Reviews
The title may have been inspired by Shakespeare, but the content of Letters to Juliet is derived from a sticky romantic comedy subgenre: the Italian vacation movie.
There's a genuinely touching movie here—Evets’s excellent performance and his character's nervous breakdown and possible redemption through forgiveness and rekindled affections—but the layers of padding that contain it end up overcushioning its impact.
Though the title of Laura Poitras’s exceptionally well-made new documentary, The Oath, is in the singular, there are a number of solemn vows therein.
The thesis of the new documentary from Oscar winner Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side) should be clear from its title. Casino Jack and the United States of Money bills itself as a “story of what our democracy has become,” a sobering examination of the corrosive influence of money on American politics.
If ever there were a movie that cried out to be either accepted on its own terms or fucking hated, that film is Trash Humpers.
While not without its stilted moments and easy sentiments, Mother and Child is lucid, engaging, and novelistic in the best sense—even if it could have used that little extra aesthetic push that made Nine Lives so remarkable.
That she rarely lets any of her characters—whether ostensibly heroes or antagonists—off the hook indicates a cynicism that’s at least grounded and far-sighted, but it also often makes her films feel agenda-driven, narrow, and guarded.
Boogie Woogie attempts to take a brutally honest look at the dark underbelly of contemporary art and the people who admire, sell, and purchase it.
Straightforwardly titled yet bent to the max, Pornography is a shape-shifting, genre-twisting plunge into a nefarious sexual underworld that so envisions itself as a David Lynch film it might just qualify as having an identity crisis.
As with so many films that bear the “Merchant Ivory Presents” imprimatur, The City of Your Final Destination is preoccupied with legacy—inheritance, knowledge, generational conflict, the betraying or keeping of familial secrets.
A middling satire that eventually sinks into unbearable melodrama, first-time writer-director Derrick Borte’s send-up of American consumer culture is expectedly bland.
The title of the new Argentinean film The Secret in Their Eyes sounds like a crummy Anglicization of a foreign import. Alas, no, it’s a direct translation, and, ultimately, all too fitting for the moth-eaten movie at hand.
In its own wild way—and precisely because of its wildness—Ade’s film is a perfectly complete portrait of romantic entanglement. Being on the inside can be brutal, but few things are as worthy of the trouble.
Midway through Who Do You Love, Muddy Waters and his band are in a rural pool hall having a loud good time, when harmonica player Little Walter brushes against a white man in billiard shot stance. Violence erupts, epithets fly, and murder seems imminent until officers arrive (absurdly quickly) and break it up.