In two entirely unrelated ways, I Care a Lot perfectly showcases two of the foremost aesthetic limitations facing contemporary cinema. The simpler one to talk about is that it’s just really damn gross-looking, with the kind of chintzy digital cinematography that has come to define so many direct-to-streaming films (it has been divvied up between Netflix and Amazon in most of the world). It’s so crisp that even the soft […]
She Dies Tomorrow is a film that is first and foremost about creating a mood, and I wonder if you might be able to guess what that mood is based on just the title. Hint: while “tomorrow” is a word with a negotiable definition in this case, the title is not ironic. The film, writer-director Amy Seimetz’s second feature in those capacities (she’s had a career that has floated between […]
Ten minutes into The True Adventures of Wolfboy, we were triggered. You see, I usually shut off movies about bullying and Rob is super self-conscious about his body hair (he has the perfect amount of body hair), so when a young kid with hypertrichosis gets verbally abused by some douchebags at a carnival, tensions were high. About The True Adventures of Wolfboy The True Adventures of Wolfboy follows a young […]
Ten minutes into The True Adventures of Wolfboy, we were triggered. You see, I usually shut off movies about bullying and Rob is super self-conscious about his body hair (he has the perfect amount of body hair), so when a young kid with hypertrichosis gets verbally abused by some douchebags at a carnival, tensions were high. About The True Adventures of Wolfboy The True Adventures of Wolfboy follows a young […]
I have nothing but scorn for the full title Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn), which I will only henceforth refer to as Birds of Prey in the interest of bringing this review in under 3000 words,* but credit where credit’s due, it’s unquestionably right for the movie it’s attached to. It’s extremely fucking eager to impress upon you with how quirky and zany and […]
The films of Noah Baumbach are extremely divisive: between those who find the characters in his scripts so vile that you can’t stand watching them, and those who find the characters so vile that it’s brave and bracing. Do please note that there is no phantom third variety of people who find his characters pleasant and likable and interesting. So it is with Greenberg, the writer-director’s sixth feature, and his […]
It appears that responses to Julie & Julia come in two basic styles: -The Meryl Streep half of the movie is fantastic, and the Amy Adams half is breezy enough that the whole counts as a successful entertainment, without anything that’s going to make you regret the price of a ticket. -The Meryl Streep half of the movie is fantastic, but the Amy Adams half is shallow enough, and too […]
I’ve been trying for a while now to figure out exactly what Away We Go proves: -that Sam Mendes has no facility for directing comedy? -that when Sam Mendes is a remarkable chameleon able to shed lovely, high-budget prestige pictures for scruffy, quirky independent dramedies without bringing any trace of the one subgenre to the other, and in both cases pitching squarely at the middle of that subgenre’s quality range? […]
Woody Allen’s projects aren’t films so much as they are changes in the weather: sometimes delightful, sometimes annoying, nothing that anybody says or does can do much to change them, and they occur in a roughly annual cycle. With that in mind (extremely strained metaphor to follow), his latest feature, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, is like a warm breeze on a hot summer day, insubstantial as all hell but refreshing and […]
Greetings and welcome back to Raspberry Picking, where we look back at Golden Raspberry Award winners and decide whether they really deserve to be called the worst movies ever. This month, we’re looking at Hudson Hawk, winner of three Razzies and baffler of the moviegoing public. The last time Bruce Willis landed in our bucket during Raspberry Picking, he was a peripheral player, a pawn in the battle of wills […]
