Reviews
Even though his latest, the autobiographical Keep the Lights On, which charts a tortured ten-year relationship between two men, is his first New York–set movie, where Sachs has lived since he relocated in 1985, it also takes the shape of an outsider’s story.
If Compliance seeks to sift through the events to help us make sense of how they could take place and we leave still rather incredulous, then on the whole it must be taken as a failure.
What if one of the world’s great film artists released her first major, feature-length narrative in nearly a decade, one based on the writings of a revered author firmly entrenched in the western canon, and no one noticed?
Killer Joe is like a fairy tale scribbled in the margins of a dirty joke book. Letts is a romantic of the Tennessee Williams school—it can’t be love if it doesn’t have claws.
Ai seems exceedingly good at telling the kinds of stories he wants people to know, and at times it’s difficult to tell whether he or Klayman is directing the documentary.
And so we come to the bombastic, bludgeoning finale. I can’t say I was particularly hopeful that cowriter-director Christopher Nolan would close out his wildly popular Batman trilogy with much grace, but I did go in prepared to give it a fair shot.
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.