After a few weeks have passed, I can tell you I like the movie even less now than I did when writing the shiv to the ribs as published below. Now here’s a scientist’s review, and after reading this equally disdainful piece (it’s full of math you can skim if that doesn’t interest you), I […]
Not Fade Away, Sopranos mastermind David Chase’s (seemingly) autobiographical, literally sepia-toned flashback to the time of rock and roll ascendance that came between the assassinations of JFK, MLK and RFK, has to be most dramatically inert and unsurprising coming of age drama I think I may have ever seen. Seriously.
Derek Cinefrance’s gloomy relationship mopefest Blue Valentine (2011), while not a terrifically uplifting sit, nonetheless showed great promise in the filmmaker’s patience and willingness to let depth of character drive the narrative of his film. Cinefrance’s sensational and moving new offering The Place Beyond the Pines, currently in theatrical release, not only builds on the potential […]
On my childhood vacations to exotic Myrtle Beach, at least once during the weeklong stay I’d always suffer a ‘giant wave’ nightmare: I’m sitting and playing on the beach (as I’d done for real all day long) when I realize a looming, enormous wave’s about to crash down onto the beach, and me. The Impossible, written […]
Dir: Yaron Zilburman Scr: Seth Grossman, Yaron Zilburman An RKO Films Release A famous string quartet called The Fugue has been around for twenty-five years, as has the marriage of two of its members, Robert (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) and Juliette (Catherine Keener). Both ensemble and relationship are fracturing, however—its cellist and senior member, a widowed […]
Dir-Scr: Craig Zobel After causing a minor stir at Sundance but then not really getting distributed to any significant degree, Craig Zobel’s Compliance examines a true story from 2006 about a fast food manager Sandra (Ann Dowd) who receives a call from alleged police officer claiming that an attractive, young female employee Becky (Dreama Walker) […]
After a decade of mo-cap kid movies, big ticket director Robert Zemeckis returns from the uncanny valley to live action filmmaking with Flight, a Denzel Washington Oscar-bait vehicle that starts out as spectacular as much of Zemeckis’ prior catalog would lead viewers to expect, with a plane crash sequence even more harrowing than the one […]
So the supposedly retiring Steven Soderbergh’s penultimate movie is a micro-budget male stripper soap opera? Yep. A solid, respectable, and profitable base hit (a triple to right center, let’s say, but just barely a triple), Magic Mike makes for an undemanding, not-terribly-stylized two-hour character study with a fair degree of heart. From the Saul Bass 70s Warner Brothers logo […]
LOOPER A Sony/TriStar Pictures Release Dir-scr: Rian Johnson Throughout the history of storytelling, writers and other artists have toyed with a Big Impossible Idea: that of attaining the power imbued through an ability to move outside the parameters of the flow of time. It’s irresistible for one reason alone—the individual who has the ability to […]
UPDATE: After viewing all 13 episodes, the Netflix Original series House of Cards builds to a thrilling conclusion in which all of Rep. Underwood’s machinations, some of which have turned deadly, demonstrate both how far he will go to achieve his ravenous ambition, and how far that naked, amoral hunger will take him. Only an […]
