7 years ago
Featured (10 posts found)
“Southpaw” Is The Equivalent of A Great White Dope
Southpaw starts at a name, but it’s not the titular boxing term this movie brandishes and emblematically forgets to define. It’s the lead character’s surname of Hope, a branding that dares filmmakers and audiences alike to take anything he does right on the no...
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“The Vatican Tapes” Is A Cold Shower to Horror Fans
The rich symbolism and ethereal mystique of religions—especially of Catholicism—has fed the horror genre a steady diet of creepy material over the years. And no subgenre has been as direct a beneficiary of this as the exorcism subgenre. You know how it goes: A...
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The Act of Silence: LBJ and the Indonesian Genocide of 1965
Between The Act of Killing and now The Look of Silence, filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer has now given audiences a well-rounded look at a tragic event that had somehow been lost to history’s abyss: the killing of up to a million innocent civilians by the Indonesia...
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“Phoenix” Is Both Preposterous And Haunting
How far will two people go to preserve their respective illusions? Chilling and tender in equal measure, German director Christian Petzold’s dark romance Phoenix is a study of post-World War II identity in flux, playing as both a preposterous melodrama and a m...
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The Unbearable Sameness of “Ant-Man” and Marvel Movies
Hollywood churns out a lot of superhero movies, but then, they also churn out a lot of movies about, say, cops. Multiple times each year, multiplexes will run new releases about the boys in blue, and yet the public isn’t subjected to a deluge of thinkpieces ab...
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Mousterpiece Cinema, Episode 206: “Ant-Man”
Hey, friends! This week's podcast is a little smaller than usual, so you may need to keep a sharp eye out for it. Actually, this podcast is extremely small, as small as an...insect of some kind. Maybe a bee? Yes, this episode of Mousterpiece Cinema is all abou...
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Woody Allen’s “Irrational Man” Is Familiar, But Engaging
Woody Allen’s latest vehicle conveys the filmmaker’s self-deprecating ways and recurrent fascinations with death and murder. Joaquin Phoenix is suitably cast as the nihilistic and life-hating philosophy professor Abe Lucas. Following Allen’s dreary and forgett...
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The Funny-As-Hell “Trainwreck” Is Anything But
“We all know one.” So goes the tagline for Trainwreck, comic phenom Amy Schumer’s debut starring vehicle with Judd Apatow. With the third season of Inside Amy Schumer in full swing and the comedian’s name seemingly plastered across the headline daily (sometime...
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Locked Up With The Too-Tidy “The Stanford Prison Experiment”
In the first week of any undergrad Introduction to Psychology course, professors will trot out one of two case studies. They can go with Stanley Milgram’s test on obedience and punishment (dramatized by the late Robin Williams in what must be one of the all-ti...
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The Bright But Uncertain Future of Film Criticism
Film reviews are tricky things. As a critic, you have to explain enough of what happens in a movie to give readers an idea of what to expect, but that plot description has to be balanced with analysis unless you want to wind up with a flat recap. You have to r...
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