Reviews
Throughout The Order of Myths, Brown refuses to drop the heavy hand that mars so many documentaries purporting to tackle “big issues.”
The past looms forebodingly throughout Boy A, threatening to capsize its protagonist’s fragile vessel of a life. It’s a lovely surprise, then, that the grace notes found within this artful character study have their roots in the pleasures and perils of the here-and-now.
Those critics who didn’t see fit to acclaim the film a masterpiece, or at least a genre high water mark, find themselves perched precariously above an angry horde calling for their heads (or worse), much like —SPOILER ALERT! —Batman at the end of The Dark Knight.
Talking faux-seriously about juvenilia has become a marvelous way to avoid talking seriously about the serious. The slew of hyperbolic, overheated critical rhetoric that follows in the wake—hell, in advance— of the latest high concept blockbuster is enough to make one gag.
Lou Reed is not an artist who needs much legacy building, although throughout his career he has often required a bit of reputation rehab.
A refreshingly high-concept low-budget outing, the Duplass Brothers’ Baghead is an immensely likeable and surprisingly well-executed genre hybrid.
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?