7 years ago
Featured (10 posts found)
“The Breakfast Club” at 30
The jock. The princess. The nerd. The rebel. The loner.
Brought together by circumstance, in detention for a full Saturday in Chicago, these five high schoolers are not strangers, but they do represent wholly different worlds. They come from different place...
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Spotlight on Fandor: “The Deep Blue Sea”
Terence Davies’s films function so completely as works of personal memory that the director’s gift for vividly detailed period recreation turns history itself into mere context for a life lived. This is especially true of the autobiographical first phase of hi...
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“Kingsman: The Secret Service”
The mission of Kingsman: The Secret Service is to make the James Bond movie that has not been, to treat the earlier painfully-British entries from Sean Connery’s trilby-hat-wearing days with hyper action, while subsequently defying the broodiness of the Daniel...
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A Cinephile’s Survival Guide to February
As assuredly as Punxsutawney Phil will crawl out of his hole every February 2nd and declare it spring (or six more weeks of winter), the second month of the year also brings upon all of us some of the worst box office weekends on the calendar. Known as a dumpi...
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Berlinale: “Knight of Cups”
With vacant eyes and mouth agape, man continues his seemingly irrevocable fall from innocence, in Terrence Malick’s eternally juvenile seventh feature Knight of Cups. Christian Bale ambles catatonically through various locales of present-day California as Gior...
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10 Best Picture Nominees That Should Have Won
Star Wars was nominated for Best Picture. Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T. The Extra Terrestrial and Avatar were all nominated for Best Picture, but failed to hold the statuette. Oscars rarely celebrate the box-office smash or sci-fi adventure film. They represen...
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Black and/or White: Race Relations on Film
Why can’t we all just get along? It should be easier than easy to vibe with people from other backgrounds than our own; there should be no obstacles or roadblocks segregating us or just plain old keeping us divided. But it’s 2015, and racial harmony is still a...
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Outback Antonioni: “Picnic at Hanging Rock” at 40
“Only a million years ago,” a teacher says of the formation of the eponymous landmark of Picnic at Hanging Rock as she escorts schoolgirls there on a field trip. Like that mass of volcanic stone, Peter Weir’s 40-year-old film is relatively young, yet it presen...
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Sundance Review: “Mistress America”
After the black and white meanderings of a directionless Brooklyn waif in Frances Ha, director Noah Baumbach and actress Greta Gerwig have teamed up once again, for something equally as quirky and wonderful (in color this time). In Mistress America we meet Tra...
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Sundance Review: “The Hunting Ground”
As the graduation processional plays bombastically in the background, dozens of young college hopefuls and families open that fateful letter. Tears of joys and squeals of delight are a brief moment of carefree excitement; elated reactions quickly tempered by w...
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