Reviews
Colin Farrell, first appearing on his front lawn in a seductive glower and matching black tank-top, is a vamp of the highest order—the role gives the Irishman a chance to strut his sundry stuff; his sexy swagger and comic chops are both on full view.
It’s clear that Ruiz wishes to envelop the viewer in lush, traditional storytelling; this being wily Ruiz, though, Mysteries of Lisbon foregrounds that storytelling to a nearly absurd degree.
Writer-director-editor-star Evan Glodell’s debut film Bellflower starts in media res. We’re treated, within its first thirty seconds, to a fragmented blend of flipped cars, backwards footage, and slow motion.
Cornish's achievement is to craft a whip-crack B-movie entertainment that's built for speed—everything in this alien-invasion thriller happens before you expect it to—but that also gets pretty good sociopolitical mileage to the gallon.
When discussing Miranda July’s second feature film, The Future, many writers have fixated on the relationship between the artist’s New Age-y pixie persona and her art, weighing in on how twee and precious her latest effort is. Relevant, perhaps, but not entirely fair to her work, which has matured significantly over time.
In The Interrupters, a valuable yet seemingly incomplete documentary, director-producer-cinematographer-editor Steve James and producer-interviewer Alex Kotlowitz shadow three “violence interrupters,” all of them employees of the Chicago-based organization CeaseFire.
Director Joe Johnston dusts off some of the mise-en-scène from his earlier foray into retro-futurist tinged action, 1991’s The Rocketeer. The Captain America costume has a particularly nice tangibility to it.
Going the Distance, Love and Other Drugs, No Strings Attached, and the latest, Will Gluck’s Friends with Benefits, are all drenched with nineties irony, ample sexting, swearing, and preening narcissism passed off as sardonic self-awareness.
I wouldn’t hesitate to trade all the dimensional novelties of the latest Pixar picture for the single moment here when the screen is tilted this way and that to rouse the eponymous ursine protagonist out of bed, a bit of play with the frame that’s right out of The Navigator.
Orphans and primitives both, Bay and Nim approach their respective means of communication—cinema and signing—awkwardly, and from a removal; their resulting control over their languages often suggests clever mimicry instead of true language.
Puiu and Sergovici constantly block our access to Viorel, placing him in distanced long shots or half-obscuring him behind entrapping door frames and obstructive curtains.
The terror of teenhood is in full flower in Azazel Jacobs’s alternately disarming and discomfiting Terri. Mostly gone is the (intentionally) coddling warmth of Jacobs’s breakout, the melancholic and marvelously musty Momma’s Man.
Most damning, though, is that the film refuses to answer the one basic question that must have come to mind for anyone who watched even the trailer: What’s her story?