7 years ago
Featured (10 posts found)
“The Tribe”
Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s The Tribe has ridden an enticing hook—it’s performed entirely in sign language, with no subtitles—to considerable critical and festival acclaim. But is there much to it beyond the admittedly fascinating formal gimmick? While it’s temp...
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“Me and Earl and the Dying Girl”
There’s an art to manipulating a moviegoing audience. Every movie practices this art. Filmmakers have to sculpt their viewers’ responses to their work, even if only to a limited extent; some do it less than others, or perhaps they do such a good job exploiting...
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“Jurassic World”
It’s impossible to discuss Jurassic World, the large-scale fourth entry in the dinosaur-laden franchise, without acknowledging the T-Rex in the room: Jurassic Park. The 1993 film by Steven Spielberg looms large over this one, not just because of its unshakable...
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Spotlight on Fandor: This Week’s Top Picks
Fandor’s ever-increasing selection of well-curated films can be daunting for new and long-time subscribers alike, especially given the obscurity of most of the selections. With that in mind, we select five films every week available for streaming to promote fo...
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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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“Total Recall” at 25
Paul Verhoeven proved his sci-fi chops with the 1987 cyberpunk masterpiece RoboCop, but that film’s grimy location shoots and dilapidated effects scarcely offered evidence that he could mount a film on the level of Total Recall. Based on Philip K. Dick’s story...
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“Roar” and the Limits of Ironic Appropriation
“No animals were harmed in the making of this film. 70 members of the cast and crew were.” So beams the promotional copy for Drafthouse Films’ recent dustbin rescue of Noel Marshall’s 1981 expensive boondoggle Roar, an animals-run-amok disaster picture with ac...
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On The Formal and Narrative Style of Nathan Silver
Across Nathan Silver’s three latest features—Exit Elena, Soft in the Head, and Uncertain Terms, exempting the just-premiered Stinking Heaven—one can immediately see a handful of formal and narrative similarities. Each opens with an ambiguous pre-title sequence...
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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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Junkies on Film: A 1990s Revival
Last year, the New York Times reported that a new heroin epidemic was raging in New York City. Evidence indicated a dramatic surge in sales and seizures around the five boroughs, and the numbers were higher than they had been in over 20 years. As the Big Apple...
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