Reviews
Rock obscurantists can be worse sticklers than sci-fi fanboys, but it must be said that Cadillac Records doesn’t condescend to history even when jumbling facts—scenes are largely treated as interactions between feasible humans, not as excuses to broadcast racial parable.
With no small bias, and a corresponding sense of urgency and advocacy, I implore you to see Milk—not because it’s a perfect film or even a great one, but because it is inspiring and deeply moving, beautiful and sad, searingly personal and boldly political.
You would think that a cross-cultural, cross-religious lesbian romance should have enough built-in conflict to sustain an 80-minute feature, but Shamim Sarif‘s I Can't Think Straight slumps and stretches its way from its first uninspired set piece.
The problem with probing each new Bond entry for sociological significance is that the series has always actively contributed to the tenor of its present moment rather than simply reflecting it, as all good capitalist enterprises should.
The premise of The Dukes is solid: the members of a doo-wop group, successful in the Sixties, are now loosely associated as losers, struggling to make alimony payments and working as line cooks in somebody's aunt’s restaurant.
One can’t accuse director Yair Hochner of not giving his target audiences what we want: in the opening fifteen minutes of the Israeli filmmaker’s ensemble dramedy of hook-ups and hang-ups among a small group of gay men in Tel Aviv, he fills the screen with all manner of groping titillation.
The kids are cute, shots are stylishly skewed, cuts are whip-quick, and rousing remixes of M.I.A.'s ubiquitous "Paper Planes" pop-pop and ching-ching throughout. Poverty can be so much fun.
Everything’s at the threshold in A Christmas Tale. Holiday time, transition, reunion, naturally, but also disease and surgery, grudge and reconciliation, degeneration and regeneration.
A helpful shortcut for negotiating the heaps of texts in this modern world: all attempts to give something familiar or antique a self-consciously edgy, gritty makeover can be, de facto, written off as terrible.
Kevin Smith’s career is one of the mysteries of American film culture. He’s eight movies into his career—eight!—and he has shown zero progress.
The film dispenses with metaphor in favor of a gritty realism where, far from being exceptional, vampires must struggle along with everyone else in the bleak, near-perpetual darkness of a Swedish winter.
Synecdoche, New York opens with a scene of finely observed domestic squalor. A suburban home rouses itself for the day. A middle-aged man declares “I don’t feel well” before sitting down to breakfast.