9 years ago
Reviews (10 posts found)
“The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel”
Don’t hold your breath, but the setting for this sequel to director John Madden’s The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is still the first title location, even though this new film spoils that a second one eventually comes into the picture. For the most part, the tou...
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“Like Sunday, Like Rain”
The experience of watching Like Sunday, Like Rain is akin to exhaling slowly for nearly an hour and forty-five minutes--the type of minor melancholy emission that lacks any real conviction or effort and disappears, having left no imprint. Reggie (Julian Shatki...
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“CHAPPiE”
If Bono directed films, he’d be Neill Blomkamp. His features smugly denounce the ruination of class and racial conflicts while nonetheless seeking easy refuge in clichéd, half-sketched images of said conflicts for the sake of drama. Everyone mocks Elysium and ...
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“The Life and Mind of Mark DeFriest”
The story of Mark DeFriest is a truth stranger than fiction. In 1980, DeFriest was sentenced to four years in prison for minor theft at the age of 20, but his fight-or-flight instincts kicked in and he fled from jail. Recaptured only a day later, DeFriest’s me...
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“Faults”
Riley Stearns’ debut feature, Faults, focuses on life within a cult. It revels in a brand of subversion that breaks individuals down until they give up all self-control to another. That absurd and pervasive pathology fittingly matches the form of the film, whi...
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“Futuro Beach”
Karim Aïnouz’s Futuro Beach is a film that searches for beauty amid the crisis of life. Drilling down on that outline, it’s a film about life cycles; the foundation of its narrative, loose and shapeless though it may be, rests on the human connections made and...
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“Buzzard”
Thanks to the efforts of Judd Apatow and his contemporaries and cohorts, the manboy currently dominates American pop culture. Slackers, stoners, dweebs, and the like are not just “in” -- they are. The dude who’s refused to accept one more iota of responsibilit...
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“Compared to What: The Improbable Journey of Barney Frank”
No great shakes as a documentary but a hugely entertaining repository of zingers, Compared To What? The Improbable Journey of Barney Frank follows the indefatigable representative from Massachusetts’ Fourth district during the waning days of his 40-year politi...
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“Eastern Boys”
Eastern Boys opens on a group of adolescents at the Gare du Nord railway station in Paris. The camera observes them from a distance, cinema verite-style, as they wander around, sometimes in groups, sometimes separate. One young boy catches the eye of a securit...
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“Focus”
Focus is two movies for the price of one. You get a sparkling, sexy comedy and its lackluster, dispiriting sequel, both in the same sitting. I enjoyed the first half of this picture as much as anything I’ve seen in a while. The exhausted CEO of Will Smith Fami...
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