7 years ago
Reviews (10 posts found)
“The Vatican Tapes” Is A Cold Shower to Horror Fans
The rich symbolism and ethereal mystique of religions—especially of Catholicism—has fed the horror genre a steady diet of creepy material over the years. And no subgenre has been as direct a beneficiary of this as the exorcism subgenre. You know how it goes: A...
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“Paper Towns” Is A Crap-Crossed Love Story
Audiences get quite a bargain when buying a ticket for Jake Schreier’s new YA lit adaptation Paper Towns. These lucky viewers will see two movies for the price of one. At a run time of approximately 105 minutes, the first is an insufferably pseudo-quirky recit...
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“Phoenix” Is Both Preposterous And Haunting
How far will two people go to preserve their respective illusions? Chilling and tender in equal measure, German director Christian Petzold’s dark romance Phoenix is a study of post-World War II identity in flux, playing as both a preposterous melodrama and a m...
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“Big Significant Things” Is Kind of a Mess, In A Good Way
Channeling its theme of millennial ennui and disaffection, Bryan Reisberg’s handsomely crafted indie road trip comedy Big Significant Things has little to say, but says it with wit and style. Reisberg doesn’t pretend to have the answers, which doesn’t feel lik...
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On The Miraculous and Innovative “Horse Money”
Note. This review originally ran during our coverage of the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival.
Pedro Costa’s filmography can be seen not only as an unified body of work, but as something approaching a miracle. The incremental shifts in his working meth...
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Woody Allen’s “Irrational Man” Is Familiar, But Engaging
Woody Allen’s latest vehicle conveys the filmmaker’s self-deprecating ways and recurrent fascinations with death and murder. Joaquin Phoenix is suitably cast as the nihilistic and life-hating philosophy professor Abe Lucas. Following Allen’s dreary and forgett...
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The Funny-As-Hell “Trainwreck” Is Anything But
“We all know one.” So goes the tagline for Trainwreck, comic phenom Amy Schumer’s debut starring vehicle with Judd Apatow. With the third season of Inside Amy Schumer in full swing and the comedian’s name seemingly plastered across the headline daily (sometime...
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Honey, I Shrunk the Rudd: On The Wry and Light “Ant-Man”
After 7 years and two phases of the Marvel cinematic universe, one thing is clear: the world can only be under threat of annihilation so many times before impending doom becomes dull. The first entry in this summer’s movie season, Avengers: Age of Ultron, suff...
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“The Look of Silence” Is One of the Best Documentaries in Decades
Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing found an idiosyncratic, formally daring means of exhuming the ghosts of the Indonesian anti-Communist purges of the 1950s and ‘60s, cajoling surviving war criminals into confessing their atrocities by getting the proud m...
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Locked Up With The Too-Tidy “The Stanford Prison Experiment”
In the first week of any undergrad Introduction to Psychology course, professors will trot out one of two case studies. They can go with Stanley Milgram’s test on obedience and punishment (dramatized by the late Robin Williams in what must be one of the all-ti...
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