In the 2010s, one of the most interesting new directorial voices anywhere in the English-speaking world has been that of Great Britain’s Ben Wheatley. Without having produced any clear-cut unambiguous masterpieces in in the handful of features, and short contribution to the horror anthology The ABCs of Death (one of the lonely few segments of […]
The word that primarily suggests itself in respect to Paddington, roughly muscling out all other possibilities, is “charming”. A word which could certainly be employed with a certain level of condescension, sure, but not really in this case. For it is an earned charm, in Paddington; the screenplay by director Paul King, from a story […]
If your chief hope from the movies is that they tell well-crafted stories in a logically committed way, then no, Blackhat probably would not seem very good. The script by Morgan Davis Foehl isn’t deficient, so much as it is vary puffy and disorganised, with no end to its dragged-out moments and inefficiencies, including a […]
Having been shot in color and on media that doesn’t look like a 30-year-old VHS camcorder, telling something that resembles a story pretty much no matter how you look at it, and gliding in at a whimsical four hours and ten minutes, Norte, the End of History certainly earns its reputation as director Lav Diaz’s […]
Winner of the Silver Hugo for Best DirectorScreens at CIFF: 10/15 & 10/16World premiere: 15 May, 2014, Cannes International Film Festival There is a heightened irony at the heart of Timbuktu that is completely obvious, and which fuels the rage that drives every moment of Abderrahmane Sissako’s first feature in eight years, following the great […]
There’s very little doubt that The Boy Next Door is a terrible movie. But it is so cheerfully overt about it that it offers the very real possibility that everybody involved in making not only knew just how terrible it was, but in fact that they might actually have signed specifically because of that fact. […]
It seems irresponsible to review American Sniper without doing so through the lens of the enormous cultural conversation surrounding it, but having actually seen the damn movie, it strikes me as rather bizarre that so many tens of thousands of words have already been spent discussing it without most of them being, y’know, accurate. Given […]
Comparing Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice – the first Pynchon novel to be filmed, no less – with the Coen brothers’ The Big Lebowski is absolutely the laziest conceivable opening gambit the reviewer of the former film could engage in, but it has the merit of being inevitable. Both films are […]
It is easy to first focus on how Goodbye to Language is yet another film in Jean-Luc Godard’s late career collection of essay films describing morality, culture, the state of modern Europe, how cinematic images produce and limit meaning, because that’s what it is. It’s not at all unlike a remake of his last feature, […]
I don’t know where the line is drawn between a story that has metaphorical aspects to it, and metaphor that is happens to take the form of a narrative, but I know that Leviathan is way the hell on the far side of it. To say that it is about corruption and cronyism in the […]
Sometimes, I have to wonder which is actually more puritanical: when American movies depicting sex do it from a winking, peekaboo remove of carefully neutered inoffensiveness, or when European – by which I almost exclusively mean French – movies depicting sex in all its explicit, damp glory suggest that the only people having sex are […]
Nothing in the description of Blue Ruin, the second feature and critical breakthrough of writer-director Jeremy Saulnier, makes it sound like much. And, if were are being mercilessly honest, that’s because there’s really not that much to it. But it’s the very definition of a thing that’s more than the sum of its parts: a […]
