9 years ago
Reviews (10 posts found)
“Force Majeure”
What if you took the premise of the Seinfeld episode “The Fire,” doused it in Scandinavian seriousness (though still with a sense of humor, but of a more wry, subdued flavor), and made it about marriage? That would be an inelegant but accurate descriptor for F...
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“The Book of Life”
Color me impressed. After years of rumors about an animated movie about the Day of the Dead and one botched attempt by a different studio to trademark the Mexican holiday, here it is in theaters. Directed by Mexican animator Jorge R. Gutierrez of Nickelodeon’s...
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“Dear White People”
There’s a scene early in Justin Simien’s debut film Dear White People where Sam (Tessa Thompson) - a student at a fictional Harvard-ish Ivy League school who’s known for organizing rallies against racist school policies - has an argument with her white friend-...
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“Fury”
If there’s a throughline to David Ayer's more personal works, it’s the struggle for fighting men to stay honest while convincing themselves that the horrors they visit upon the enemy are righteous and necessary. He makes films about moral compromise, and speci...
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“Algorithms”
As the old saying goes, if you've seen one black-and-white documentary about young, blind Indian chess players, you've seen them all In truth, the new film Algorithms starts with this singular conceptual hook, but is unable to expand upon it appropriately. Par...
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“Listen Up Philip”
What an asshole.
At not yet 35 years old, Philip Lewis Friedman (Jason Schwartzman) is about to publish his second novel. He lives in New York City with his beautiful, fashion-photographer girlfriend Ashley (Elisabeth Moss), who has supported Philip for the...
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“Camp X-Ray”
Putting aside Prince of Persia, in which Jake Gyllenhaal, one of America’s whitest actors, played Persian royalty, Hollywood has rarely shown us a Middle Eastern man who is not an imminent threat. When it does, there is so much self-conscious winking involved ...
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“Birdman”
Note. This review was originally published as part of our New York Film Festival coverage.
It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s…a disgruntled Michael Keaton? Closing out this year's New York Film Festival is director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Birdman. A fant...
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“Diplomacy”
World War II spanned six continents, lasted as many years, and involved roughly 100 million participants. Pardon the quick and dirty history lesson, but an appreciation of scale is needed to understand why people continue to write books and make movies about T...
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“Rudderless”
It would be easy and more than a little cruel to make a joke about the aimlessness of a movie called Rudderless, and indeed, there are lengthy sections of the film that feel unmoored. Directed by William H. Macy, helming his first feature, and co-written by Ma...
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