8 years ago
Festivals (10 posts found)
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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LAFF Review: ‘Goodbye World’ is the First ‘Hipster Apocalypse’ Film
Goodbye World opens in a manner that promises a more interesting movie than it actually is. We're introduced to various characters all across the country receiving mysterious spam texts saying "Goodbye World". What they don't realize is that this is a mass-tex...
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LAFF Review: ‘The Crash Reel’
"The brave might not live forever, but the cautious never live at all."
This quote pops up prominently in The Crash Reel. But if this documentary was meant to inspire me to abandon my extremely cautious existence and take more risks in life, then it failed ...
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LAFF Review: ‘First Cousin Once Removed’
We are accumulations of memories. Cinema is a way to preserve a memory. Documentarian Alan Berliner has made a career out of using film to pick apart what makes us who we are. First Cousin Once Removed is a magnificent addition to his ouvre. It's a haunting, m...
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LAFF Review: ‘Delivery’ is the Rare Horror Movie Where Nothing Happens
I can't remember for which movie it was for, but I fondly remember Francois Truffaut saying in an interview that he would make some movies just for the sole purpose of bringing one scene into existence; one scene that would "justify" the rest of the movie. Bri...
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LAFF Review: ‘In a World…’
It's an unexpected development that a relatively mainstream film has been made about voiceover artists, a subject which I had figured would only ever get its due in a nice-but-forgettable documentary. In a World... is about more than just the people who talk o...
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LAFF Review: ‘You’re Next’ Lives Up to its Festival Hype
Before the film started, director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett introduced You're Next to the crowded theater by saying up front "We made this movie with the purpose of not making you feel like a horrible person when it ends. We want people to have fun...
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LAFF Review: ‘Short Term 12’ is Cinema At Its Most Beautiful, Compassionate, and Human
There have been many films about at-risk teens receiving guidance from a surrogate parental figure, from Stand and Deliver to Freedom Writers to The Blind Side. A lot of these movies tend to feel false because they're too wrapped up with waterboarding the audi...
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Our 15 Most Anticipated Films at the Los Angeles Film Festival
The Los Angeles Film Festival (a.k.a. LAFF) has steadily been growing into one of the most finely programmed festivals of the summer. Featuring all sorts of titles ranging from the greatest hits of Sundance, highly-anticipated studio films, art-house darlings,...
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LAFF Review: ‘Fruitvale Station’ is Equally Powerful and Problematic
Reviewing a film like Fruitvale Station is unbelievably challenging. Movies based on true stories are already hard enough to critique on a plot or character level, but when you're dealing with such a harrowing, difficult story as the one about what happened on...
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