8 years ago
All posts by Tomris Laffly
“The Imitation Game”
“Are you paying attention?” asks a brisk voice at the start of Morten Tyldum’s slick and sophisticated World War II-era biopic The Imitation Game. The voice belongs to the genius WWII code-breaker and math prodigy Alan Turing, the magnificent subject of Graham...
Read more →
“The Homesman”
Stakes are high and conditions are hostile in Tommy Lee Jones’ contrastingly low-key and peaceable revisionist western The Homesman, which favors the storyline and dignified virtues of a brave frontierswoman in 19th-century Nebraska, over machismo and the law ...
Read more →
“Whiplash”
The opening moments of the hot-blooded musical thriller Whiplash summon distant sounds of jazz drums as we're drawn to a practice room in a prestigious Manhattan music school and lock our gaze onto Andrew Neiman (played by The Spectacular Now’s naturally chari...
Read more →
The Liberating, Evil Feminism of Gone Girl
Warning: Major spoilers for “Gone Girl” ahead.
In the opening moments of David Fincher’s domestic-union-gone-bad thriller Gone Girl, Nick Dunne (a seemingly vulnerable and sympathetic Ben Affleck) voices a desire to “crack a skull open.” The skull in questi...
Read more →
“The Boxtrolls”
“We are revolting children, living in revolting times”, Tim Minchin’s lyrics go in one of Matilda The Musical’s most entrancing songs, which captures the true spirit of Roald Dahl’s imagination, which seeds the justifiably dark but ultimately hopeful depths of...
Read more →
“Lilting”
Grief is often a foreign, alienating concept, even to those who’ve previously experienced it. Every loss is unique, and each aftermath is a formerly unexplored terrain. In writer/director Hong Khaou’s quiet, yet confident and instantly affecting debut feature ...
Read more →
“Pump” Review
Environmentally and socially conscious documentaries often remind us, with a healthy dose of urgency and even anger, that there's no time to waste when encouraging the responsible consumption of natural resources and exploring new alleys of achieving environme...
Read more →
“If I Stay” An All-Too-Familiar Entry in the YA Genre
There must be a written rule somewhere that all film adaptations of YA novels have to start with voiceover with muttered wise musings on life by way of introducing the female protagonist to the audience. Wasn’t it just a couple of months ago that another YA no...
Read more →
“The Hundred-Foot Journey” A Conventional And Benign Food-Centric Crowd-Pleaser
If we learned anything from food-centric crowd-pleasers like Ratatouille or Chocolat, it's that unexpected challengers will eventually bend uncompromising traditions and satisfy their opponents’ deepest indulgences. In Lasse Hallström’s latest, the characteris...
Read more →
History of Film: “The Apartment”
“Your home is your domain” the saying goes, a simple enough concept I've been pondering quite a bit lately, going through a transitional and rather plainly “domainless” phase that will entail living in a temporary arrangement. I suspect anyone who has dealt wi...
Read more →
