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The Taking of Pelham 123
Matthau’s endearing, casually racist Lt. Zachary Garber is given a PC makeover as Washington’s Walter Garber, whose tiresomely inherent nobility is tritely “complicated” by allegations of corruption;...
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Animated cinema geared specifically for adults is an elusive proposition. Even if Pixar’s recent films (especially Up and last year’s Wall*E) and Nick Park’s Aardman entertainments have truly embodied...
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The Windmill Movie
Imagine Doug Block’s laceratingly personal 51 Birch St. as compiled by his next-door neighbor and you’ll have a sense of the overall experience of The Windmill Movie. Rogers may be our avatar, but...
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Whatever Works
Introduced limping towards the camera in shabby clothes to directly assault the audience with a shockingly lengthy sampling of his withering world view (in which people are, among other things, “not...
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Rebirth of a Nation
Anachronism is what fuels Rebirth. The sepia images collide with a distinctly contemporary score and current technology, and we begin to meditate on how cinema lives in a constant state of reinvention...
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Afghan Star
The tenacity and courage of the Afghanis themselves onscreen is something to be admired, and Marking’s feature debut is overall impressive in its compassionate depiction of them, some taking...
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Quiet Chaos
The trouble with Quiet Chaos is that there’s too much quiet and not enough chaos. The emotional turmoil spoken about by the film’s characters rarely punctures its tranquil, sleepy surface. Floating...
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Public Enemies
Mostly deprived of his previously go-to visual possibilities, Mann has nothing but plodding plot progression to lean on, absent the narrative mastery he used to exercise alongside his self-evident...
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Lake Tahoe
As he traverses the neighborhood, edifices at once colorfully painted and drab, buildings of aquamarine and white and slate-gray, take up nearly the entire frame, with a shadowed door opening the only...
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Soul Power
Watching this spectacle unfold, I couldn’t help thinking that the concert film, despite the latter-day efforts of Jonathan Demme (Neil Young: Heart of Gold) and Martin Scorsese (Shine a Light), may be...
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The Vanished Empire
A lesser, if more ambitious, filmmaker would have slathered this story in allegory, but Shakhnazarov is content to let it emerge from the everyday lives of his young characters. What distinguishes The...
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Somers Town
Meadows’s new film, Somers Town, dovetails neatly with his last, offering a vivid contrast between the Eighties, when Britain's large unemployment numbers bred suspicion among the “true” English about...
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Deadgirl
A common complaint about horror movies these days is that atmosphere has been widely sacrificed for a predictable slasher structure (pick off a handsome group of teenagers one by one) that prizes...
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Not Quite Hollywood
Hartley tries to evoke the sugar-rush excitement of the Ozploitation with a rapid-fire mix of sound bites and needless 3D graphics (think The Kid Stays in the Picture) that quickly make Not Quite...
View ArticleOrphan
If ever a movie called for a patented millennial ALL-CAPS live-blogged text review, it would have to be Jaume Collet-Serra’s Orphan, or, as it will likely forever be known moving forward, OMG, DID YOU...
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