There’s a very real danger of applying a most peculiar kind of grading curve to Saving Mr. Banks. It’s a movie produced by Walt Disney Pictures, with Walt Disney as an actual character, and it presents him as more of a human being with good and bad characteristics than a plaster saint? He’s seen stubbing […]
I like to think it went this way: during the filming of Out of the Furnace, a bored Forest Whitaker and Christian Bale were goofing around on set, keeping themselves awake as actors do. And Whitaker decided to break out his impression of Bale’s over-the-top gravelly Batman voice while they were goofing around. Unfortunately this […]
Writer-director Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio works, I am tempted to say, in spite of itself; it works “for all the wrong reasons” might do just as well. They key is that it works. The film is smart as hell, for one thing. It has been carefully worked out just so, with a final third […]
For the English-speaking critic, the comparison between 2012 Danish prize-winner A Hijacking and 2013 American prize-courting Captain Phillips is as easy to make as it is spurious and unenlightening. The one is a psychological drama about the unfeelingness of corporations and hostage negotiations, the other is a politically-minded high-energy action film, and similarities of scenario […]
There almost certainly hasn’t been a more savagely dark feel-bad drama than The Broken Circle Breakdown all year, for most films in most years do not pivot on the death by cancer of a five-year-old girl. This isn’t merely a thing that happens in the film; it is the thing that happens, the ominous point […]
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug had every reason on Earth to be clearly and significantly better than The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, but it’s much closer to being a dead heat. This ends up being far, far more depressing than An Unexpected Journey was in isolation, for there was still hope after that movie. […]
More than once, a film or a filmmaker has been compared to Terrence Malick, but nothing in my experience has ever been so unmistakably and overtly Malick-influenced as Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, which couldn’t telegraph its indebtedness to Badlands more explicitly if it named its protagonists Sissy and Martin. The question that then instantly presents […]
Wanna know what it looks like when the bottom falls out of a movie franchise? Because it looks like
American Hustle is set in the 1970s, and tells a vigorously fictionalised account of the ABSCAM sting set up by the FBI to target corrupt politicians in 1978, but it’s a ’60s movie. For despite its grittastic cinematography and the word “American” there in the title, both of them promising a neo-New Hollywood exercise in […]
There is no way to describe All Is Lost and end up making it sound like it’s broadly accessible, which is really too damn bad. For it truly is one of the films of 2013 I’d feel best about recommending to the largest number of people for the most diverse set of reasons, virtually complete […]
There are horrifying moments aplenty in Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s advocacy documentary Blackfish, but the one that hit hardest for me was when one of the movie’s many talking heads (apologies for the paucity of my note-taking, there are a lot of people and very few of them get identified more than once) recalls the story of […]
I will tell you what I like about Homefront: nothing. I will also, however, tell you what I like about REVIEWING Homefront, which is that the film offers a perfectly gift-wrapped opportunity to offer up thought pieces on the career and star persona of its leading man, Jason Statham. This is not a subject that […]
