Reviews
The power issues run deeper in Winterbottom’s film than in Hardy’s novel because they are not just socioeconomic and gendered; Jay is half-British, raising additional questions of race and postcolonial identity.
Though expansive, Tocha aims not for ethnographic chronicle as the film’s three-plus hours, organized into sixteen sections, might suggest, but poetic evocation.
Ironically, though, emphasizing the “surprising” depth or warmth (or whatever) in Magic Mike downplays what’s most intriguing about the film.
A deft replica of its idiosyncratic forebears, Beasts of the Southern Wild is one of the most ambitious debut features to come out of American cinema in years—and one of the most calculated.
Brave has its problems, not least of which are an overreliance on the sort of yes-dear sitcom stereotyping that characterizes many of the interactions between the stern Elinor and boisterous Fergus. That said, I think it’s worth considering Brave’s particular concerns and cinematic predilections on their own terms
The film apparently seeks to use a thriller structure as a launching pad for a study of a man’s internal crisis, but the result is a mixture of the inchoate and the pitiful.
A comedy of contrivance that gives off the whiff of a dusted-off workshop draft, Your Sister’s Sister never recovers from its inauthentic opener.
In the beginning, there was a hairless, pearly white albino humanoid with an exceptionally strong nose and dead eyes. Let’s call him Powder.
Seven movies into Wes Anderson’s career, the arguments rage on but the opinions have settled: you know by now where you stand on the matter.
Though his film follows a conventional narrative, it would seem Peli cannot resist incorporating found footage, using it to introduce his characters and again, predictably, for a kill sequence.
Where la Rochelle held what amounted to an unforgivably romantic view of suicide, which the young idealistic Malle embraced, Trier (only a distant relation of Lars) has opted to strip away their stylistic floss to forge, in a soberly formal style, a raw and relevant portrait of Scandinavian suffering.
Shot on grainy, jittery, slate-gray 16mm, Alex Ross Perry’s The Color Wheel is a rare issuance from the lost generation of young American filmmakers in the fin du cinéma age that looks and feels “like a real movie.”
Midway through Hirokazu Kore-eda’s I Wish, a grandfather grumpily wonders, “Do kids today feel anything about anything?” Judging by this enchanting and wise film, indeed they do.
Superhero narratives historically depend upon the tension between the human and the superhuman—we can relate and we can’t, they’re one of us and they’re not—but this film quite literally takes place in the clouds.