To begin with, Wild is a great deal better than 2007’s Into the Wild, its most direct antecedent in the “people finding themselves by dropping out and trekking through nature, meeting several people along the way who give symbolic life lessons, and ‘Wild’ is in the title” genre. And really, that’s all I needed to […]
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 […]
There are two ways, I think, that one could go about making a story of Alan Turing and his key role in inventing the computer as a means of cracking a Nazi code during the Second World War. One way would be to go all-in on the psychological aspect, and take it for granted that […]
First point: Foxcatcher is, I am certainly, exactly the film director Bennett Miller wanted it to be. It is too precise, too focused, and too consistent for anything else to be the case. Second point: that’s not really much of an excuse. A true story of psychological gamesmanship between one of the more peculiar members […]
Update: This review was based on what was in retrospect a screening plagued by a highly deficient projector resulting in unusually poor image quality. While I don’t suspect that I’d ever come anywhere close to actually liking the movie, it’s safe to say that my actual thoughts are more of a 6/10 than a 5/10, […]
Very rarely, we’re given the great and deep privilege of seeing a movie that reaffirms our collective humanity and opens us to worlds of joy and hope and pain and fear and love that we never knew existed. Movies that are emotional and spiritual journeys as much as they are a collection of images strung […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/12 & 10/14 & 10/20World premiere: 26 August, 2013, Montréal World Film Festival The question: how many shots of gorgeous cloudy skies with intensely augmented color correction that leaves them looking even more dramatic and powerful and just exactly perfect for an inspirational poster does it take before a movie starts to […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/12 & 10/14 & 10/16World premiere: 31 August, 2013, Montréal World Film Festival There is, at this time, violence and rapine afflicting various countries in Africa and central Asia that goes almost totally unremarked in the news media of the developed world and unnoticed by the inhabitants thereof, and for the most […]
The critic must not try to hide his biases when they might get in the way of the review; and boy, did I ever head into Silver Linings Playbook, at long last, with a basketful of biases. “Bradley Cooper as a romantic lead” is very close to the least appealing combination of performer and role […]
So as it turns out, the cultural hegemony angle on The Impossible is a bit of a non-starter. You know the one I’m talking about, if you’ve been paying much attention to the talk around the movie: the first major international film about the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, which tells the story of how hundreds […]
You can’t always complain about how sex in movies comes in either the “prurient, puritanical, and embarrassed” flavor of the American cinema or the “explicit, specific, joyless, and punishing” flavor of the French (which I probably do more in real life than on the blog, but still…) and then not praise a movie that is […]
Hype is a great leveler: it can ruin a giant studio tentpole or an indie film so tiny it barely exists with equal measure. I start this way, because in the span of just about 18 hours, I saw two movies that, by every fair measure, I “liked”; and for both of them, I had […]
