Still Alice is the kind of movie that exists solely to facilitate a great performance in the lead role, and Julianne Moore provides one. So that’s, like, a good thing. And that Oscar she has not received yet for playing the role as I write these words, but surely will in a few weeks time […]
Critiquing the critics is an unlovely habit, but sometimes it makes itself necessary. To wit: the accuracy with which Selma depicts the presidency of Lyndon Baines Johnson is entirely besides the point. The film is taking historical figures, and a historical situation, and dramatising them for the purpose of making certain points. It’s got the […]
Li’l Quinquin is, I gather from those who would know, a really bad choice to have as one’s first exposure to director Bruno Dumont. So before I start going on about how wonderful it is – and I am going be quite obnoxiously enthusiastic, too – you should know that I have no idea what […]
There are times when one has been primed to expect an all-out disaster, and getting something functionally mediocre instead is no less disappointing than expecting a great movie and getting one that’s just okay. So when I confess to being disappointed by Transcendence, I hope you’ll know what I mean. The directorial debut of Wally […]
It is called Taken 3. Not Tak3n. I can’t express how disappointed that fact makes me, and if I were able to, it would probably just make you suspect that I had some severe emotional problems. So anyway, the grand finale that isn’t to a trilogy that wasn’t supposed to be, and who among us […]
Once upon a time (the rumor goes), two sisters both loved and lusted after important 18th Century German author/critic Friedrich Schiller (Florian Stetter), and it’s at this point that we perhaps tense up a little bit in regards to Beloved Sisters, recalling all of the other person that find Long-Dead Important Artist Better-Known By Academics […]
In the wide world of sequels that certainly don’t have any actual reason to exist, one could do a lot worse, conceptually speaking, than The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death – though that title! There’s absolutely nothing that mouthful achieves that wouldn’t be more accurately and clearly covered by just plain The Woman […]
Pride is, in the first place, an irresistibly nice movie. There’s a question to be asked whether that is, in and of itself, its big problem. For it is also a movie set against an extremely non-nice pair of events: the miners’ strike of 1984-’85 in Great Britain, and the expanding AIDS crisis. And while […]
In the finest tradition of British filmmaking, Belle is more or less single-handedly saved by its actors. It’s not that there’s anything precisely wrong with Amma Asante’s script – which is credited to Misan Sagay because of a whole WGA arbitration thing that makes a bit of sense until you step back to ask the […]
Stories set in economic downturns aren’t all that rare, but ones made with the subtle insight of Ilo Ilo are as precious and unique as it gets. And that’s saying nothing about the film’s perceptive, harsh study of human interactions, but since I’ve started on this road, let me follow it for a bit. The […]
There’s no good in hiding the obvious: director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s seventh feature Winter Sleep, winner of the 2014 Palme d’Or, is three hours and sixteen minutes long, with most of that time given to people talking. This is a shallow observation, but the film emphasises the weight of its running time to an extreme […]
The Two Faces of January isn’t just any old adaptation of a Patricia Highsmith novel (though it’s not like those are thick on the ground). It’s one of those grandiose passion projects you here tell about, a film that Hossein Amini has been nursing close to his breast for some 15 years or so, or […]
