7 years ago
Reviews (10 posts found)
‘White House Down’ is Quality Summer Trash
Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them. - Pauline Kael
The above quote from endlessly influential film critic Pauline Kael perfectly summates White House Down, Roland Emmeric...
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‘The Heat’
The Heat is a mostly unpleasant film to watch, and an even worse film to review. Deserving neither a love letter nor an autopsy, Paul Feig's fifth directorial feature is as aggressively average a movie as I've seen in recent memory.
In the vein of '80s acti...
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LAFF Review: ‘My Sister’s Quinceañera’
Independent cinema has exploded thanks to the proliferation of technology, but truly independent film remains on the periphery. Film festivals are often chock-full of "independent" movies that are headlined by known actors, made by established industry profess...
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‘Byzantium’
This review has been republished from our coverage of the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival.
Saoirse Ronan, as an actor, has a rare ability to project a depth of melancholy, even in almost total stillness. Her alarmingly blue eyes lend themselves to her playing c...
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‘Between Us’
It's tough to successfully bring stage plays to cinema. With Between Us, director Dan Mirvish (co-founder of the Slamdance Film Festival, incidentally) and writer Joe Hortua (who wrote the play on which the film is based) are clearly trying to capture a Who's ...
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‘A Hijacking’
Coming down the pipeline in a few months is Captain Phillips, a Paul Greengrass-directed, Tom Hanks-starring action thriller based on the 2009 hijacking of the Maersk Alabama. It looks to be full of shaking cameras, soldier-type people running around, and aggr...
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‘This Is Martin Bonner’
Chad Hartigan sets up the title card for his sophomore feature, This Is Martin Bonner, with small but revealing glimpses into the character’s life. We meet Martin (Paul Eenhoorn) in a Nevada prison, attempting to sell an inmate on a Christian-themed rehabilita...
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‘World War Z’
World War Z is a series of action vignettes held together by worn duct tape and the crummiest post-converted 3D since Clash of the Titans. It purports to be based on the remarkable book of the same name by Max Brooks, but it contorts the notions of “adaptatio...
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‘The Bling Ring’
Based on the events written in a Vanity Fair article entitled “The Suspects Wore Louboutins,” Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring is an amplified portrait of a culture consumed by vanity and superficiality. However, contrary to Spring Breakers, Coppola’s fifth film...
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‘Man of Steel’
Superman might just be the hardest character in pop culture to define. While all versions share some characteristics, everyone’s own personal vision of him is a little different. To some, he’s the big blue Boy Scout who would save a kitten from a tree, crack a...
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