7 years ago
Reviews (10 posts found)
‘Triumph of the Wall’
The most clever thing about Triumph of the Wall is the title. Eight years in the making, Triumph pays a titular nod to Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous documentary while creating a bit of infamy of its own: This is one of the worst full-length documentaries I have ...
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‘Frances Ha’
The opening credits of Noah Baumbach’s last feature, 2010’s Greenberg, play over lingering shots of the film’s co-star Greta Gerwig as she drives around Los Angeles to the tune of Steve Miller Band’s “Jet Airliner”. The shot is unbroken, in profile and close u...
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‘The East’
This review of The East originally appeared at The Film Stage during the Sundance film festival.
Serving as an engaging antithesis to last year’s Sound of My Voice (a cryptic piece of filmmaking that left a myriad of questions unanswered), Zal Batmanglij’s...
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‘Before Midnight’
If you’d told me 20 years ago that the director of Dazed and Confused would go on to make the most truthful and elegant cinematic expression of love since Annie Hall, I would have never stopped laughing. Truth be told, I don’t think anyone expected the Texan o...
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‘Behind the Candelabra’
The sickly yellow color filtering of Steven Soderbergh’s digital work turns fully golden with Behind the Candelabra, every frame shaded in the opulence of its subjects’ lifestyle. It's a fitting aesthetic touch to document Liberace, a performer seen in the fil...
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‘Fast & Furious 6’
Lunacy is the name of the game for the Fast & Furious franchise. It always has been and it always will be. Fast & Furious 6 rises to new incongruous, downright bizarre heights—more endless explosions, more tracking shots of women's behinds, more dour d...
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‘The Hangover Part III’
Like the inevitably disappointing trip to the kebab stand that concludes so many a subpar night of heavy drinking, so too does one of the most unnecessary trilogies in the history of motion pictures slump to its subdued and flavorless finale. Jettisoning the p...
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‘Star Trek Into Darkness’
J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek films are not the worst examples of Hollywood’s risk-reducing homogenization of its populist entertainment, but they may display this worrying trait most visibly for what they chuck out of their source material. As a property, Star Trek ...
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‘Sex, Lies & Depravity’
Sex, Lies & Depravity was an incredibly hard thing to endure. Not because of the aforementioned sex, lies, or even the depravity of the title, but because it is such a poorly constructed and downright bizarre affair that to get through it without your brai...
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‘Star Trek Into Darkness’
As someone with only a faint knowledge of the Star Trek franchise, mostly through other bits of media and pop culture references, 2009’s Star Trek was a huge breath of fresh air. Here was a larger than life franchise with characters so iconic and ingrained in ...
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