9 years ago
Reviews (10 posts found)
“Night Moves”: No Succor In The Wilderness
If you've ever watched a Jesse Eisenberg performance, you've most likely formed an image of him in your mind as the loquacious aggro-nerd: the man fills the air with a rapid-fire staccato of verbiage that flips between hostile (The Social Network) and neurotic...
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“The Fault In Our Stars” Earns The Tears You’ll Inevitably Shed
As tempting as it is to roll eyes at the subject matter of teenage love fettered by terminal illness, Josh Boone’s The Fault In Our Stars -a refreshingly sober melodrama, respectful of such a weighty topic it dissects- requires one to check that attitude at th...
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“Trust Me” Reinforces All The Familiar Tropes About How Awful Hollywood Is
The takeaway from Trust Me, the new film from multi-hyphenate Clark Gregg, is almost as old as time itself: Hollywood is the worst! Gregg all but marks off each expected cliche from a checklist. Venal agents? Check. Self-serving, heartless producers? Check. Ac...
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“The Sacrament” Exploits Tragedy For Thrills And Meaning
Ti West is nothing if not obsessed by the past. In point of fact, the guy has built most of his career on dipping into the well of 60s-80s horror, drawing on notable niches of both eras to provide blueprints for movies ranging from House of the Devil to The In...
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“We Are The Best!” A Lived-In, Punk-Rock Delight
Three girls start a band in We are the Best!, but that’s not really what the movie is about. Set in Stockholm in 1982, most of the action does indeed focus on punk-music-obsessed pre-teens engaging in indiscriminate cymbal-slamming and bass-strumming - yet the...
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“Before You Know It” Is a Tender, Moving Look At Love in Old Age
At the beginning of Before You Know It, main character Dennis rhapsodizes on how the young never think about getting old. I must be an outlier, because I think about getting old all the time. I think about mortality in general an awful lot, really. And that mi...
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“Filth”: Has Plenty of It And Nothing Else
Telling a story entirely through the perspective of a film’s main character is a tricky proposition if that character is a drug-addled, hallucinating, misogynist wreck of a human being. Such filmmaking is tantamount to daring the audience to endure a high-temp...
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“Age of Uprising: The Legend of Michael Kohlhaas” Is A Subversive Revenge Tale
Heinrich von Kleist's novella about the legend of Michael Kohlhaas is considered one of the first examples of modern literature. Kohlhaas is a hero of 16th Century Germany, but his name isn't as instantly recognizable as someone like William Wallace, thus the ...
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“A Million Ways To Die In The West”: Regressing In Time Literally and Figuratively
Since the inception of Family Guy back in 1999, Seth McFarlane has proven himself to be somewhat of a jack-of-all-trades. A writer, director, comedian, producer, voice actor and Sinatra impersonator, the New England born performer has his hands in an assortmen...
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“Blended”: A Sour Sandler-Barrymore Reunion
At first, Blended seems like just the latest emotionally stunted Happy Madison production, those nearly annual occurrences that increasingly resemble ritualistic tributes to some ancient evil with horrible taste. It opens not merely in a Hooters but in the bat...
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