7 years ago
Reviews (10 posts found)
“The Diary of a Teenage Girl” Is As Messy As Other Indie Teen Sex Dramedies
It's 1976 and, as she enthuses to her tape-recorder diary, 15-year-old Minnie Goetze (Bel Powley) has just had sex for the first time—with her mother’s (Kristen Wiig) boyfriend, Monroe (Alexander Skarsgård). Based on the hybrid graphic novel/regular novel by P...
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“Listen to Me Marlon” Is A Worthy Tribute to Brando
You could thumb through a thesaurus all day and still not find sufficient hyperbole to describe Marlon Brando's impact on the craft of acting. A prize pupil of Stella Adler, who brought the Stanislavsky Method to America, Brando blew it all up. Overnight, the ...
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“Best of Enemies” Is A Shallow Look At A Political Pair
There was a time I fervently believed that there were no bad documentary subjects -- only bad documentaries. That anything could make for a good narrative, that any person could make for an interesting protagonist. A lot has changed since that time of my life ...
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“I Am Chris Farley” Avoids Exploring The Man’s Dark Side
Toward the end of I Am Chris Farley, Brent Hodge’s biography of the late, great comic force of nature, Bob Odenkirk measures the tragic circumference of Farley’s death in one quote: "It's just rare that a person has that much joy, and brings that much happines...
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“Rogue Nation” Is The Best “Mission: Impossible” Film So Far
Ethan Hunt (the 53-going-on-35 Tom Cruise) may not be considered a superhero, but he undoubtedly possesses powers that appear to be superhuman. He may not have a web to sling and his most impressive gadget continues to be a ludicrously transformative face-mask...
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“A LEGO Brickumentary” Feels More Like A Commercial
LEGOs are the little toy that could. What began as the brainchild of a Danish carpenter in the 1940s has gradually grown into a corporate powerhouse that generates $4 billion annually in revenue. The signature plastic blocks and yellow figurines are popping up...
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Locked Between Professional and Personal: On “The End of the Tour”
Early reports on James Ponsoldt’s sensitive, earnest The End Of The Tour tended to describe the film as something of a David Foster Wallace biopic--a notion abhorrent in literary circles that still hold up Wallace as an untouchable, multifaceted genius. Those ...
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“Paulo Coelho’s Best Story” Is Too Trite To Be His Best
Brazilian renaissance man Paulo Coelho has lived a life best described as quixotic. He’s well-known for penning The Alchemist, a slim tome that’s become the most widely translated novel by a living author. Left in the margins of his literary success are a vari...
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“Unexpected” Is Anything But
The ability to make babies is one of the defining differences between the sexes, but it isn’t the same for all women. In Unexpected, director Kris Swanberg attempts to explore how two women in radically different stages of life experience an unplanned pregnanc...
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“Southpaw” Is The Equivalent of A Great White Dope
Southpaw starts at a name, but it’s not the titular boxing term this movie brandishes and emblematically forgets to define. It’s the lead character’s surname of Hope, a branding that dares filmmakers and audiences alike to take anything he does right on the no...
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