9 years ago
Reviews (10 posts found)
“The Tale of Princess Kaguya”
Note. This review was originally published during our coverage of Fantastic Fest 2014.
Within a year, two titans of animated filmmaking have decided to bring their long-storied careers to a close. Last year, Studio Ghibli co-founder and animation maestro Ha...
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“Waiting for August”
Snow swirls across a highway, lit up by headlights in the dark. It's winter in Bacau, Romania, and for the Halmac family, stuffed into cramped social housing, money is very tight. The mother, Liliana, has taken a job as a domestic worker in Italy and sends mon...
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“Dracula Untold”
Ambiguity isn't tolerated by studios anymore, especially when it comes to high-profile characters who can serve as franchise-starters. And characters don't come with a higher profile than the lord of vampires himself, Dracula. Origin stories boomed with Batman...
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“Watchers of the Sky”
“We’ve run the numbers here and have decided that each American life is worth about 80,000 Rwandan lives.”
There is no context under which this sentence is not completely outrageous, much less so when you realize that real foreign policy decisions that cost...
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“St. Vincent”
During the post-screening Q&A of the world premiere of St. Vincent at the Toronto International Film Festival, Bill Murray joked that the only reason first-time director Theodore Melfi cast him as the lead was because “Jack Nicholson wasn’t available.” At ...
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“Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day”
If not for the presence of Steve Carell and Jennifer Garner, the adaptation of Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day might have been more fitting as a Disney Channel movie-of-the-week. It’s a mercifully brief film—75 minutes pass before t...
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“Whiplash”
The opening moments of the hot-blooded musical thriller Whiplash summon distant sounds of jazz drums as we're drawn to a practice room in a prestigious Manhattan music school and lock our gaze onto Andrew Neiman (played by The Spectacular Now’s naturally chari...
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“Annabelle”
Here’s a lesson in basic box office science: horror movies make money. When horror movies make money, they tend to beget horror movie sequels and prequels, hence the mercifully defunct Saw series’ long-overstayed welcome. So the rare horror movie that’s both w...
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“Men, Women & Children”
We begin in outer space.
After kicking off with a pompous, Malick-esque montage of Voyager 1 departing the solar system for parts unknown, director Jason Reitman’s sixth feature plummets back to Earth just in time to catch Adam Sandler rubbing it out to Por...
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“Nas: Time Is Illmatic”
Jay-Z may have laid claim to the title The Blueprint, but Illmatic remains the truest Rosetta stone of hip-hop, dictating the shape and methods that the genre would take in the coming decades. A twenty-year-old Nas wrote the Great American Rap Album in 1994 by...
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