9 years ago
Reviews (10 posts found)
“Tracers”
Despite Hollywood’s occasional attempts at introducing parkour into the domestic action-genre landscape, that particular athletic style hasn’t quite taken off as hoped in America, for one reason or another. Understandably, it isn’t easy to center a film about ...
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“The Divergent Series: Insurgent”
The Divergent Series: Insurgent is so unmemorable that its long-winded, SEO-boosting title becomes a helpful marker for keeping track of what it is you’re watching. The film begins with more “previously on” summary than a late episode of Lost, but even the con...
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“Jauja”
Mysteriously opaque and thrillingly spooky, Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja evokes what many films aspire to yet rarely achieve: a genuine lucid state of cinema-as-dream. Staking out terrain somewhere between a surrealist Western and John Ford-like fairy-tale, it’s a ...
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“Backcountry”
Actor Adam MacDonald’s debut film as a writer-director, Backcountry, walks down the same road so many horror films have to the point where the subgenre has been parodied in films like The Cabin in the Woods. Jenn (Missy Peregrym) and Alex (Jeff Roop), a young ...
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“Amour Fou”
“He has a rather melancholic disposition,” says one woman about the young 19th-century poet Heinrich von Kleist (Christian Friedel) in the opening minutes of Amour Fou. It’s an observation that can only be described as a gross understatement when considering t...
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“The Gunman”
The Gunman is an odd hodgepodge of conflicting ideas. It’s adapted from an existentialist French crime novel from the 1980s, but turns it into a conventional action thriller that aims to please some crowds—workable. But onto that is grafted a twinge of social ...
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“Merchants of Doubt”
Nobody has ever won a game of Three Card Monte, magician Jamy Ian Swiss says at the outset of Merchants of Doubt. What made the game such a cornerstone of the street economy in the New York City of my youth were the shills - upstanding-looking folks hired by t...
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“Spring”
A profound and unshakable sense of unease pervades the entirety of Spring, from the opening scene all the way to the unexpected finish. Ostensibly, the film starts out somewhat like Before Sunrise, if that Richard Linklater film took place entirely in the head...
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“Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter”
The first image of David Zellner’s Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter is not its own. Rather, it is the opening text—a wry “true story” disclaimer filtered through the fuzzy distortion of a worn VHS—from the Coen brothers’ Fargo. The analog snow and intense tracking,...
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“It Follows”
Certainly on a technical level, David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows stands out as one of the stronger horror offerings of recent years. As its title suggests, Mitchell’s film is about the dread of knowing something horrendous will happen, that Sword of Damocles...
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