7 years ago
Featured (10 posts found)
“Aloha”
To explain it in the most Cameron Crowe terms possible: watching Aloha is like hearing a new album by one of those bands you loved in high school, but you’ve both kinda gone your separate ways.
There was a time, however brief and wonderful, when this band see...
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Don Hertzfeldt: Beauty and Sadness in Bite-Sized Portions
Alissa Wilkinson has written about pop culture, politics, and religion all over the Internet. She is chief film critic at Christianity Today and assistant professor of English and humanities at The King's College in New York City. Based in Brooklyn, her work h...
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Round 2: The Marvel-Industrial Complex
When I wrote "The Marvel-Industrial Complex" at the invitation of Movie Mezzanine a few weeks ago, it was just supposed to be a thinkpiece with some actual thought behind it, as well as a way of talking about some of the more disquieting corporate and cultural...
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Mezzanine Essentials: “Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams”
Like the magic lantern that evokes childhood’s fascination with moving images in the films of Ingmar Bergman, the whole of Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams seems to take us back to the medium’s infancy, to its primal pleasures and terrors. It is a film in which the sho...
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The Exceptional Characters in Brad Bird’s Films
Brad Bird is, to date, among a handful of mainstream filmmakers with a Midas touch. Though his new film Tomorrowland represents the closest thing to an exception to the rule--it's big, bold, messy, and never quite able to deliver any kind of satisfying payoff ...
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“When Marnie Was There”
When Marnie Was There may end up being the final work from Studio Ghibli. Hence, there’s a strong temptation for a critic to tie the movie’s themes and story with some sense of finality or closure. But as far as I know, no one making the film was aware of the ...
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The 19 Best Actors-Turned-Directors
There's no single path that leads to directing a film--some dive right behind the camera as their first job, others work up to it after years of toiling as assistant directors, and then others get the gig because of their work in front of the camera coupled wi...
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Cannes Review: “Irrational Man”
If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. The guarantee that with each new year comes another mediocre Woody Allen film used to be something I would do my best to ignore. Then I continually found myself in situations on airplanes, where having theretofore avoided whate...
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Homesick for the Past: On the Modern Film Critic
The unrepentant dandy of a critic Addison DeWitt (George Sanders) in All About Eve (1950) wields his influence like the magic of a Faustian Satan, manipulating stars and playwrights with nothing but the threat of a review. Yet he stands from society, distanced...
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“Slow West”
When working in a genre as well-worn as the Western, the temptation is strong to toy with storytelling form. We’ve seen this in efforts as varied as the revisionist Unforgiven (1992) and last year’s parodic A Million Ways to Die in the West. But John Maclean’s...
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