8 years ago
LAFF (10 posts found)
LAFF Reviews: “They Came Together”, “Nightingale”, and “The Well”
They Came Together
For over a decade, fans of the ludicrous summer-camp spoof movie Wet Hot American Summer have been waiting for the director/co-writer duo of David Wain and Michael Showalter to create a follow-up for their cult-classic comedy. Although we...
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LAFF Review: ‘The Overnighters’
"Love thy neighbor" is one of the foundational creeds of Christianity, which is, according to many, the set of beliefs by which Americans are supposed to live their lives. But America today is a land of rampant corporatism, a system in which love is not a tene...
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LAFF Review: “Frank” is Gleefully Manic Until Its All Too Real
Once there was an English musician-comedian named Chris Sievey who would perform wearing a large fake head under the name of "Frank Sidebottom." Sievey was a thoroughly underground sensation for his whole career, until his death from cancer in 2010. Now, bits ...
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LAFF Review: “Love is Strange”
Ira Sachs's new film Love is Strange opens with Ben and George being asked if their decision to marry is of their own free will. They, of course, say yes. And almost immediately after that, they are hurled into circumstances that are beyond their control, prec...
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The 2014 Los Angeles Film Festival: “Starred Up” and “Runoff”
The British crime picture is a seemingly ubiquitous genre, and its sister sub-genre, the prison film, is nearly as popular, with Nicolas Winding Refn's Bronson kicking off a renaissance of sorts. Like Bronson, David Mackenzie's Starred Up centers on a charisma...
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LAFF Review: “Snowpiercer” is Spectacularly Off the Rails
Once upon a time, Bong Joon-Ho's ambitious sci-fi action film Snowpiercer was threatened with an Americanized edit by controversial industry magnate Harvey Weinstein. Fans of the Korean auteur (as well as fans of good sci-fi in general) were understandably ver...
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The Hainline Diaries: Recapping the 2013 Los Angeles Film Festival
Los Angeles Film Festival: Spanish for "The Film Festival of Angels."
Saturday, June 15:
I pull into Parking Garage B at LA Live, barely able to see in front of me. This wasn't the world-famous LA smog, this was rather the side effect of having spent the...
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LAFF Review: ‘My Sister’s Quinceañera’
Independent cinema has exploded thanks to the proliferation of technology, but truly independent film remains on the periphery. Film festivals are often chock-full of "independent" movies that are headlined by known actors, made by established industry profess...
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LAFF Review: ‘Winter in the Blood’
James Welch's 1974 novel Winter in the Blood is a quietly important piece of work, one of the earliest voices to emerge in modern Native American literature. Now, sibling directors Alex and Andrew Smith, unheard from since their 2002 debut feature The Slaughte...
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LAFF Review: ‘Concussion’
By my highly scientific calculations, there have been approximately eleventy billion movies made about people seeking solace from their loveless marriages by throwing themselves into affairs. Concussion narrowly drags itself out of that pack to become somethin...
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