8 years ago
All posts by Tom Clift
Such a Beautiful Day: On The Works of Don Hertzfeldt
Don Hertzfeldt is, in my not-so-humble opinion, one of the most talented filmmakers working today. That statement may sound hyperbolic, but only until you consider that all of his movies are about stick figures, and that their combined lengths barely adds up t...
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“Waiting for August”
Snow swirls across a highway, lit up by headlights in the dark. It's winter in Bacau, Romania, and for the Halmac family, stuffed into cramped social housing, money is very tight. The mother, Liliana, has taken a job as a domestic worker in Italy and sends mon...
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Dardennes, Dolan and Berlinale Winner the Highlights of the 2014 Sydney Film Festival
This past Sunday, the 61st annual edition of the Sydney Film Festival came to a close. Of the more than 180 films that screened at the festival, a dozen fought it out in the Official Competition, with the $61,000 prize eventually going to Luc and Jean-Pierre D...
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Aronofsky’s “Noah” Can’t Keep Its Head Above Water
Love him or hate him, Darren Aronofsky has always been a filmmaker with vision. Be it in the unrelenting close-ups and quick-cuts of Requiem for a Dream, the body-horror of Black Swan or the breathtaking celestial sights of The Fountain, he’s a director who re...
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The “RoboCop” Remake Stays (Mostly) True to the Subversive Spirit of the Original
Few Hollywood films, past or present, are as savagely subversive as Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop. Released in 1987 at the (then) height of commercial excess and populist blockbuster entertainment, the film’s outlandish one-word premise and over-the-top sci-fi gunp...
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‘Passion’ Is Silly, Lurid, Not Particularly Good But Very Entertaining
Tom Clift reviews 'Passion', the new film by Brian De Palma, starring Rachel McAdams and Noomi Rapace.
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Wong Kar-Wai’s ‘The Grandmaster’ is Visually Decadent But Narratively Patchy
The following review is an expanded version of one that ran as part of our coverage of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, where a longer cut of the film was exhibited than is being released in the United States.
While it’s not necessarily a stan...
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‘The World’s End’: Temper Your Expectations For A Cornetto You’ve Tasted Before
Director Edgar Wright and stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost return for one last bite of the Cornetto in The World’s End, the final entry in their pop-culturally attuned comic answer to Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colors films, the Blood & Ice-Cream trilogy....
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‘Kick-Ass 2’: Lame, Obligatory, and With Nothing Subversive to Say
Despite having hung up the mask at the end of the original, Kick-Ass 2 sees bespectacled high-schooler Dave Lizewski (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) once again don the identity of costumed crime fighter, Kick-Ass. The reason? Well, there wouldn’t be a sequel if he didn...
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