One doesn’t get to use the word “exquisite” enough to describe movies, so it gives me great pleasure to declare that Mr. Turner is exactly that. It is, to begin with, stupefyingly beautiful: not another movie in 2014, not another movie since The Tree of Life, in fact, has made me literally stop breathing because […]
We take Stephen Sondheim very, very seriously around these parts. One doesn’t become objectively the best creator of stage musicals in history without earning the right to have one’s work treated with the gravest respect and unbridled love. This has not, to date, been the attitude shared by Hollywood, which has largely manhandled and mistreated […]
The life story of Louis Zamperini is fascinating and wide-ranging, and it shouldn’t even be possible to condense it into a movie as all-around misguided as Unbroken. But that’s what happens when you throw an enormous non-fiction bestseller at talentless check-cashing hacks like Joel & Ethan Coen. Or something. I suspect that the story of […]
Whatever else can be said, surely Starred Up is the year’s rawest English-language film. Merciless shorn of everything that minutely resembles dross, it’s a lean, muscly film about lean, muscly psychologies, eschewing needlessly embellishing details or even any reasonable exposition in its goal to present the tension and physical of life inside prison. The film’s […]
There’s a nifty piece of advice for screenwriters trying to solve the apparently intractable problem of Strong Female Characters; I think it was originally said by Geena Davis. In a nutshell, the trick to writing a Strong Female Character is thus: write a Strong Male Character. Then give him a girl’s name and make him […]
I’ll tell you what, there’s a lot of pleasure to be had in watching a real movie-movie. The kind that’s totally drunk on the expressive potential of cinema and does not give a shit about what it’s saying, as long as it says it with visual fervor. That’s the spirit that animated the French New […]
It’s kind of fascinating to know in advance that The Interview is going to be one of the most historically important movies of 2014. Who knows what happens in the future? Could be that everybody’s enthusiasm for The Grand Budapest Hotel evaporates the instant that it gets a Best Picture nomination at the Oscars. Five […]
Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb, the third and final chapter in the second most beloved series of children’s movies starring Ben Stiller and involving African mammals running wild, is better than 2009’s Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian. Let’s allow it to have that. God knows it doesn’t have anything […]
It’s solely a reflection of the kind of films that Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne usually make that the obvious first response to Two Days, One Night, their newest film of suffocating poverty and human disconnection, made in a viscerally anti-beautiful style with a cast made up almost entirely of shabby-looking unknowns, is that […]
Politics and commercial American cinema rarely have ever played together nicely. There was a long stretch during the Depression,* when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was adored in ways that no nationally significant politician has been since the Vietnam War started, and it was generally safe to make movies that openly talked about and engaged with Democratic […]
In the United States of America, in the year 2014, when the country’s race relations reached their lowest ebb in what feels like decades, there is a clear value to a film whose protagonist is an African-American child, and for which no attention is paid to that fact. No special pleading, no political messaging. Just […]
With 2011’s Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked, we arrive at my favorite point in the life of a franchise: when everybody stopped caring and lost their goddamned minds. The chief failure of Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel, made two years prior – and oh, how many different ways that film fails! it is an […]
