9 years ago
Reviews (10 posts found)
“Madame Bovary”
Emma Bovary is famously recognized as one of literature’s least sympathetic heroines. Entitled and selfish, her only driving motivation is an unquenchable hunger for material wealth and passionate affairs with men upon whom she can project her naïve romantic f...
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“Blind”
Blind, the directorial debut from Norwegian screenwriter Eskil Vogt, is really four films stuffed into one. On the one hand, it’s the story of Ingrid (Ellen Dorrit Petersen), a former teacher adjusting to life as a blind woman after a debilitating accident. Th...
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“Police Story: Lockdown”
Those expecting Jackie Chan to be a virtuoso of swinging limbs should be warned that Ding Sheng's new film Police Story: Lockdown isn't like other martial arts pictures that made Chan a household name. He's over 60 now, and the high-flying acrobatics that have...
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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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“Love and Mercy”
Brian Wilson is one of the most extraordinary musicians to ever take on this world, given the lifetime of drama he’s endured and the masterpieces that he’s transported from inside his head into studio sessions. His life narrative of pop compositions, a lost ma...
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“Hungry Hearts”
It used to be that filmmakers served up witchcraft, mutant babies, and the Devil himself as allegories for the anxieties of new parenthood. In Saverio Costanzo’s Hungry Hearts, we get something both blander and possibly more frightening: the 21st-century obses...
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“Spy”
Note. This review originally ran as part of our coverage of South by Southwest 2015.
Despite having almost literally the most generic title it could possibly have, Spy is a dizzyingly funny espionage comedy, with a non-farcical, non-spoof plot that works on a...
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“A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence”
Together, the three films of Swedish writer/director Roy Andersson’s “trilogy about being a human being” are like a parody of European art cinema brought to life. Each has been a co-production mainly between Scandinavian countries, featuring the whitest white ...
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“We Are Still Here”
Culture, it’s said, moves cyclically. The generation of filmmakers who whiled away their childhoods sitting rapt before the hundredth replay of a John Carpenter film on VHS has come of age, and those hours spent glued to the TV have paid off. With The Guest an...
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“Aloha”
To explain it in the most Cameron Crowe terms possible: watching Aloha is like hearing a new album by one of those bands you loved in high school, but you’ve both kinda gone your separate ways.
There was a time, however brief and wonderful, when this band see...
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