9 years ago
Reviews (10 posts found)
“V/H/S: Viral”
Anthology film series often dip and peak in quality from one installment to the next, just as each individual anthology features segments of varying quality. Each series is bound to the caprice of film production, as they depend on whatever filmmakers they man...
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“Dumb and Dumber To”
Credit the Farrelly Brothers with this much: given Hollywood’s toxic insistence on character arcs, life lessons, and labored backstories, it’s kind of a relief to discover their signature morons haven’t changed in the slightest. The world may have moved on sin...
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“Beyond the Lights”
Those who say all the stories have been told and that all that is left is to retell them in different ways fail to account for the fact that this is how new stories are made. If you strip it of its context, Beyond the Lights has been told before, a film about ...
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“Rosewater”
Rosewater is at once everything and nothing like what we expect from The Daily Show host Jon Stewart. The title feels like a political watchword, and the film itself is a furious indictment of governmental oppression and human ignorance. It’s also blisteringly...
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“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 ...
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“Beside Still Waters”
Note. This review originally was published as part of our coverage of the Atlanta Film Festival.
Beside Still Waters sets itself apart from the increasingly homogenized indie scene for myriad reasons, none more important nor immediately apparent than its sh...
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“Foxcatcher”
In the films of Bennett Miller, the truth is in the silence. The indelible image of Capote is of Philip Seymour Hoffman sitting forward in his seat, listening and trying to comprehend the mind of a murderer. In Moneyball, it's the silence around the scouting t...
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“The Tower”
Boy, has The Tower been put through the wringer in the last 6 years. It began its life as a novel in 2008; was translated into a two-part television event in 2012; and now has had both of those halves stitched together into a theatrical release for American th...
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“Open Windows”
Open Windows is a found-footage film, although it purports to be something “more.” The movie is built around the gimmick of showing all of its events happening, in their entirety, on a single computer screen. But after the first half-hour or so, all constraint...
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“The Way He Looks”
To call The Way He Looks “slight” is by no means a pejorative. Its small ambitions and very compactness is why it succeeds, even to some degree exceeding expectations. Yet it has all the ingredients for a clichéd cocktail: part coming-out, part coming-of-age, ...
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