8 years ago
All posts by Tomris Laffly
“The Vatican Tapes” Is A Cold Shower to Horror Fans
The rich symbolism and ethereal mystique of religions—especially of Catholicism—has fed the horror genre a steady diet of creepy material over the years. And no subgenre has been as direct a beneficiary of this as the exorcism subgenre. You know how it goes: A...
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Woody Allen’s “Irrational Man” Is Familiar, But Engaging
Woody Allen’s latest vehicle conveys the filmmaker’s self-deprecating ways and recurrent fascinations with death and murder. Joaquin Phoenix is suitably cast as the nihilistic and life-hating philosophy professor Abe Lucas. Following Allen’s dreary and forgett...
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On The Run: A Review of The Gripping “Catch Me Daddy”
As the latest addition to the list of recent British social realism films, Daniel Wolfe’s debut feature Catch Me Daddy is a gripping account of a troubled night for two lovers on the run. Mostly set in the shadowy, mystifying moors of Yorkshire, the film effec...
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“Eden”
On the surface, Mia Hansen-Løve’s exquisite, delicately nostalgic film Eden is a personal homage to the “French Touch” generation that gives electronic music its long-overdue eulogy in cinema. It is a beautiful, slick, and streamlined surface, ripe with melanc...
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“The Overnight”
You might have heard that the 2015 Sundance Film Festival has been an exceptionally “sexy” one (even for Sundance) with a range of films, from The Bronze to Sleeping with Other People, that either take seriously or outrageously goof around bedroom intimacy. Wr...
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“Insidious: Chapter 3”
Note. This review contains spoilers for Insidious and Insidious: Chapter 2.
She died in Chapter 1. And she provided a considerable amount of help to the characters of Chapter 2 (of course, in spirit) in their fight against life-threatening demons. With writer...
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“Sunshine Superman”
Carl Boenish was a relentless lover of many enthusiasms, which included cinema, sky-diving and his partner in life/crime, Jean. There are thrill chasers, adrenaline junkies, and then there is Boenish. An engineer by education, cinematographer by trade, and an ...
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“I’ll See You in My Dreams”
It’s the same story at the top of every summer. Despite small but noticeable steps from Hollywood, summer screens from coast to coast still cater largely to the desires of the young male demographic, with superheroes, busy action vehicles (and maybe a couple o...
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“The D Train”
Warning: There be spoilers within.
Reflecting upon the years since high school and re-evaluating life goals and missed opportunities is a tough exercise. Yet, in The D Train, the now-middle-aged Dan Landsman (Jack Black) seems to have done pretty well for him...
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“Adult Beginners”
Coming-of-age tales featuring adult characters who resist growing up are a popular subject for many indie-film darlings. While there is no harm in recycling a current and increasingly common life crisis as a plot device, one at least expects such characters to...
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