The first challenge in talking about The Duke of Burgundy is describing it. I think it is a tremendously great film; but the sort of people who would be most likely to agree with me aren’t the people who’d be most easily seduced by hearing the basic details of its scenario, and the sort of […]
The unifying characteristic of the vast majority of feature-length films made by Walt Disney Animation Studios has been an unflagging, self-conscious classicism. These films, by and large, exist out of time, adopting folklore from across the world and treating it with a careful remove, with only an isolated gag here or there reminding us that […]
Brothers Alex & Stephen Kendrick, of Georgia, are white fundamentalist Evangelical Christians who have made many a film about other white fundamentalist Evangelical Christians. One of them starred no less a superstar in that community than Kirk Cameron, which tells you what kind of fundamentalist Evangelicalism they’re attached to, and I will not suggest what […]
There’s nothing more relaxingly unimaginative than a biopic of a socially significant artist, and 2015 didn’t produce one of those more defiantly unchallenging than Trumbo. We cannot say that this life and times of Communist screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (Bryan Cranston), one of the most prominent faces to be screwed over by the anti-Leftist blacklist of […]
I was not made sufficiently aware that Girlhood is kind of a remake of 1995’s La Haine, or if we don’t want to go too nuts, it is a film that exists in the space made possible because of La Haine (a massively influential depiction of poor urban youth that triggered an entire subgenre of […]
Nothing in writer-director Josh Mond’s James White counts as my cup of tea: if the whole “low-budget indie about the life of a 20something New Yorker” wasn’t enough of a red flag, along comes “aesthetic vocabulary that steals everything that the late John Cassavetes hadn’t bothered to lock down” to murder any and all interest […]
There is a critical conceit that I’m sure you’ve all bumped into, where certain filmmakers get a number of “freebies” – at one point in their career, they made a single film so impressive that the critic in question has decided that they get to make several bad films before we give up on them. […]
I would say, “once you’ve seen one Icelandic domestic comedy-drama, you’ve seen ’em all”, but perhaps that’s making very wrong assumptions about the English-speaking cinephile’s consumption habits. Still, the point stands. GrÃmur Hákonarson’s Rams, winner of the Prix Un Certain Regard at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, has a great many things about it that […]
You’ve got to love the purity of the sequelling that’s happening in Ride Along 2, which re-teams director Tim Story with ubiquitous comic imp Kevin Hart and suitably glowering Ice Cube (who has perhaps concluded that the best way to fuck tha police is to portray them as slapstick clowns). What people loved about the […]
The gap between what a film wants to be and what a film is doesn’t get much finer than it does with Deadpool, which I suppose makes it a success? It’s hard to imagine a film less prone to leaving audiences disappointed: the thing you walk into it expecting it to be is completely and […]
We’re so far along the hype/anti-hype/counter-anti-hype path in regards to The Witch, a year and more after it was the toast of Sundance 2015, that I really don’t know what we’re “meant” to think about it at this point. I am merely content to therefore claim that I really liked it, anyway. And I do […]
An unyielding commitment to honesty in the face of the supremely obvious demands that I concede that Forrest Gump, a gargantuan box-office hit that was the highest-grossing film at the U.S. box office in 1994 and the fourth-highest-grossing film in U.S. history at the time of its release, the winner of six Oscars including Best […]
