7 years ago
Featured (10 posts found)
TIFF Review: “Cemetery of Splendour”
Cemetery of Splendour, the latest feature film from Apichatpong Weerasethakul, takes place in a zone of quietly haunted purgatory: an environment in which human lives hang in the balance between life and death, the lines between fantasy and reality are blurred...
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“Sleeping With Other People” Is Thoroughly Enjoyable
Sleeping with Other People, writer-director Lesyle Headland's follow-up to Bachelorette (2012), saws off the more robustly salty bits of her first film in favor of a safe-in-the-arms-of-formula romantic comedy starring Alison Brie and Jason Sudeikis as Lainey ...
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“The Visit” Is M. Night Shyamalan’s Best Film Since “Signs”
In the late summer of 1999, two low-budget movies intended to scare audiences helped change one aspect of the mainstream-cinema landscape: the bare-bones found-footage horror film The Blair Witch Project and the spooky psychological thriller The Sixth Sense, w...
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“Coming Home” Is Bland And Ultimately Forgettable
If you were told that Coming Home was about a mother suffering from amnesia and the father and daughter who are forced to come to terms with the effects of her illness on them, you might assume that this was Hollywood’s latest attempt at an Oscar-bait prestige...
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“Dragon Blade” Is A Baffling Paradox
The collected forces of the Chinese entertainment economy entrusted Daniel Lee, director of the majestically incompetent historical epic Dragon Blade, with a $65 million budget for his newest feature. To provide some financial context, The Sparkle Roll Media C...
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“Z for Zachariah” And The Future of Humanity
Robert C. O’Brien’s 1974 novel Z for Zachariah tells a story of Paradise unregainable. In O’Brien’s novel, unlike Craig Zobel’s recent film adaptation, there is no Caleb character at all. Instead, Loomis is the man who killed his coworker. He has few good inte...
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Why Fan Theories Are Destroying Film Discourse
Did you know that, in The Dark Knight, the hero was actually the Joker? It’s true—if you buy into this recent theory posited by a user on Reddit. And did you know that Andy’s mom in Toy Story is also the grown version of the girl named Emily in Toy Story 2 who...
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Wes Craven: In Memoriam
It's clear from the outpouring of love after his death on August 30 that Wes Craven was not just a revered horror filmmaker, but also a pioneer in a kind of socially minded self-aware genre filmmaking that continues to flourish today. Before he made films, he ...
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“No Escape” Is Crude, Xenophobic Trash
There’s a legitimately hair-raising sequence early in No Escape that left me traumatized. Owen Wilson and his wife Lake Bell have traveled with their two daughters to a conspicuously unnamed country in Southeast Asia where he’s supposed to start a new job at a...
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“We Are Your Friends” Doesn’t Know Who It’s For
While the shiny beautiful people of Hollywood sip elaborate cocktails in their hilltop mansions, the common rabble toil away at crap day-jobs in the San Fernando Valley. As they live in the literal shadow of the lifestyle they covet, wide-eyed dreamers short o...
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