Reviews
Beyond the film’s racial dodginess, The Impossible’s do-anything desire to appeal to its audience is so all encompassing that it hurts the film on a technical level as well as a sociopolitical one.
The first feature film written and directed by Sopranos creator David Chase, Not Fade Away is principally a period film: a small-scale dramedy set against the backdrop of the tumultuous sixties as they unfold in a tri-state town within spitting distance of—but a world away from—the Village’s bohemian mecca.
The equivocation of a freed slave and Siegfried—the most resplendently blonde-haired, blue-eyed hero of Scandinavian lore—is a self-consciously audacious joke, and it's one that Tarantino carries through as Django pursues his own version of the hero's quest.
It may lack Rings’ rounded, three-dimensional contours, but it still gives us the impression that we’re inhabiting the unfamiliar world of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, a place with its own laws of physics, its own history, languages, and social rituals.
Rick Alverson’s The Comedy is the latest in a long tradition of films that adhere to a program of aesthetic distancing in order to level scathing sociocultural critique.
In the latest documentary from Western Ohio’s young Bill and Turner Ross, Tchoupitoulas, named after a street in the Big Easy, three young, African-American protagonists scamper through the city over the course of one long evening.
Providing evidence that hyper-verbal does not equal hyper-articulate, the characters in the latest David O. Russell film are constantly firing blanks on all cylinders.
For all of its aesthetic and political posturing, Killing Them Softly is a toothless creature—a cinematic paper tiger. Pitt makes for a telling emblem is this regard.
We shouldn’t be shocked when movies as emotionally generous as In the Family fall through the cracks; we should just be encouraged when they get noticed. And that’s the case with Wang’s film.
The flamboyant color palette and liquid camerawork help justify the film as above all a fairy tale, which early on gives Lee free reign to indulge in a self-aware exoticism.
The best that the filmmaking Cerberus that produced Cloud Atlas can muster is a kind of rote blockbuster-ized uniformity which irons out all idiosyncrasies.
The Twilight franchise has a reputation for lacking subtlety. The choice between a shirtless werewolf boy-man (Team Jacob) and a sparkling vampire (Team Edward) has thus far been the series’ major cultural contribution.
Hong equates language and cultural barriers with other sources of alienation—for instance, a character’s dim awareness of her status as a character—but In Another Country isn’t as weighty as that sounds.
The delight of Sam Mendes’s movie (what an odd way to begin a sentence!) is its indulgence in a kind of shameless showmanship that’s quite distinct from the all-out sensory assault practiced by so many contemporary action movies.