Reviews
One of Man on Wire’s not inconsiderable achievements is that it encourages appreciation of the towers as architecture rather than as mere death monuments.
The film eventually shifts away from these subtler moments and focuses on the fierce brawls between convicts, a far more flagrant and shocking confluence of institutional power abuse and inmate rage.
In Hancock, the funny scenes are tagged with spry, staccato music that indicates when it’s okay to laugh; the scenes of straight-faced superheroism are set to a bombastic orchestral score that sounds like any other.
The catchwords for Before I Forget would seem to be direct, intimate, unsparing; yet, conversely, it also feels cavernous and, in its seeming brutal frankness, slippery and elusive.
Silvio Soldini’s Days and Clouds couldn’t ask for a more fittingly precipitous point in time for its American theatrical release than this disquieting summer of soaring gas prices, staycations, anxious awaiting of stimulus checks, and shuttering Starbucks.
As much as Wall*E is Chaplinesque, he is also the Chaplin of the 1930s, the one who, awash in cultural and financial capital, decided to expend it on a pair of politically engaged problem films, Modern Times and The Great Dictator.
I debated: Should I go see Get Smart relying on vague childhood memories of the TV show in reruns, or rent a DVD of the series and remind myself of more than just the infamous shoe phone and Don Adams’s rapid-fire deadpan?
By her own account, The Last Mistress is Catherine Breillat’s most accessible film, the only one that doesn’t set out to break any taboos.
Almost all of the recent superhero franchises have been placed on the shoulders of actors known more for flexing acting chops than gym-sculpted physiques, and Norton’s history of playing loners, losers, and boy-next-door sociopaths places him in the off-casting pantheon.
Each of M. Night Shyamalan’s studio films thus far have employed, or even exploited, genre scenarios to similar ends—to question the unknown, to collapse boundaries between well-trod fantasy tropes and untranslatable spirituality, and ultimately, to preach the importance of human connection in the face of trauma or even tragedy.
Hunter S. Thompson’s prose was nervy and pugnacious, his judgments bullying and hyperbolic, his life as volatile as any in postwar American letters. Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson couldn’t be any more different in mien and spirit.
A brutally funny and relentlessly squirm-inducing film about neuroses, loneliness, and love, Expired posits the traffic cop as the nadir of self-esteem and the constant recipient of abuse and disgust.
There’s a comforting ease (or laziness) to writing about a new Guy Maddin, regardless of one’s ultimate opinion of the film itself. Maddin is one of those rare filmmakers who neither progresses nor retreats, neither stultifies nor excites.
If only someone would make a fictional gay romance that had as much feeling and depth as Tina Mascara and Guido Santi’s Chris & Don: A Love Story.