Reviews
Sexuality and spirituality make for oddly natural bedfellows in Stephen Cone’s gentle, authentic The Wise Kids. Equally generous to all of its characters in a way that seems borderline radical for an American indie, this is a becalmed work about roiling emotions.
It’s clear now from their six fiction features that whatever the Dardenne brothers point their camera at becomes, for that moment, the most interesting thing in the universe.
John Carter never had a chance. Weeks before the film was released, reports of its impending flameout trickled into trade publications.
Swooping into theaters if only to reaffirm that technical audacity can overcome neither soullessness nor a lack of central logic, Silent House is the latest horror-movie-as-filmmakers’-challenge from Chris Kentis and Laura Lau.
Justin Kurzel doesn’t pull any punches in his first feature. Providing no easy signposts by which to navigate, the filmmaker plunges us without fanfare into sordid depths, based on real events that took place in Australia in the nineties.
This Is Not a Film—which Panahi made while under house arrest awaiting sentencing, collaborating with his friend, the documentarian Motjaba Mirtahmasb—is more than a great, devastating piece of moviemaking; the movie is something of a cinematic miracle.
If you’ve ever pondered the daily existence of a pedophilic predator who keeps his beatific ten-year-old sexual object locked in a special basement room—what he looks like, what he eats, what television he watches—Markus Schleinzer’s Michael might just be the film for you.
Films about the experiences of returning veterans have long been on American screens, from 1946 Oscar-winner The Best Years of Our Lives to 2010’s The Messenger (one of several recent contributions to the genre), but writer-director Liza Johnson manages a fresh, surprising approach to the subject matter.
Moverman seems less interested in the particulars of the misconduct than in conducting an experiment in perspective.
Even if the film does rely somewhat too heavily on Radcliffe opening doors and lighting candles at the expense of deepening its world for a more free-floating dread, it must be acknowledged that it’s often scary as all get out.
This is consumption not for pleasure or taste, but to achieve the most meager of sustenance. The Turin Horse repeats this routine with each new day, each time with the cadence and solemnity of a religious rite.
One of the problems with found footage movies like this one has always been, and continues to be, the need to regularly re-establish the vantage point from which the images we’re watching are being captured.
Some horror movies send you off into the dark night giddy with fear and pleasantly reeling from revulsion. Others give you a glimpse of something so dark and bleak that you’re left with a queasiness in the pit of your stomach.
Liam Neeson has a very particular set of skills, skills he has acquired over a very long career. These include being an authentic hulk: before he worked with Steven Spielberg and Atom Egoyan, he did background-brute duty in Krull and The Delta Force.