7 years ago
Featured (10 posts found)
“Mississippi Grind” Is A Toast to Beautiful Losers
Mississippi Grind is a low-stakes movie about high-stakes people who flirt with life and death. Films about gamblers tend toward the tragic more often than they do the comedic (Ocean’s Eleven films notwithstanding), but Mississippi Grind never quite imposes a ...
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Chaos and Conviction: “King of New York” At 25
Released in the same year as Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas and Joel and Ethan Coen’s Miller’s Crossing, Abel Ferrara’s King of New York has shamefully slipped through the cracks when it comes to charting and discussing great early-1990s crime films. While compa...
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“That’s Italian!”: On the 25th Anniversary of “GoodFellas”
I was fifteen years old on September 21st, 1990 – the day Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas opened in theatres -- and a full two carloads of us had negotiated the necessary curfew extensions to go see a 10:30 PM show at the Showcase multiplex in Revere, a suburb ju...
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TIFF Review: “Francofonia”
Aleksandr Sokurov takes on fresh formal territory in his latest film, Francofonia. Having previously dabbled in nonfiction (his early documentaries on artists like Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Dmitri Shostakovich), historical docudrama (Moloch, Taurus, The Sun) ...
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TIFF Review: “Louder Than Bombs”
Joachim Trier has built a strong body of work that explores the deep interiors and emotional fissures of depression and loss, and he continues exploring these preoccupations in his latest, Louder Than Bombs, an American middle-class-family melodrama based on t...
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TIFF Review: “Legend”
The Kray brothers enjoy a special place in British history as the notorious gangsters who controlled East End London in the 1960s, and in Brian Helgeland's Legend, the twin brothers are played by the beautiful and weird Tom Hardy twice over. He brings his odd ...
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“The Gag Man” And His History with Buster Keaton
Editor's note: Today, we're proud to present readers with an exclusive passage from Matthew Dessem's book The Gag Man. Be sure to pick up the book up now that it's available for purchase from The Critical Press.
In retrospect, Clyde Bruckman was such a natu...
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TIFF Review: “About Ray”
Even though About Ray revolves around a transgender teenager, this isn’t the hot-button topical-issue film one might expect. Certainly, there is very little anguished hand-wringing about transgender issues; among most of the main cast of characters, transgende...
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TIFF Review: “The Martian”
Science can save us. Even if you’re an astronaut left behind for dead on Mars, it’s possible to “science the shit” out of staying alive. That’s the thesis behind Ridley Scott’s latest sci-fi blockbuster, based on the best-selling, scientifically accurate novel...
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The Film Festival Blurb Generator
It's film festival season, and you know what that means: lots of coverage of movies you can't see yet because you can't afford to go to Venice, Telluride, or even Toronto. But we have a solution! For the 99% of us who can't attend the festivals and comb through...
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