8 years ago
The Canon (10 posts found)
Modern essentials
“Why Don’t You Play in Hell?”
Sion Sono originally wrote the script to Why Don’t You Play in Hell? back in the late ‘90s, but it may have ended up being a boon that the film was not made until now. The story deals heavily in nostalgia and broken dreams, and being able to tie that in with t...
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“National Gallery”
Aside from Jean-Luc Godard, it’s hard to think of an octogenarian auteur who remains as vital and intellectually playful as 84-year-old documentary master Frederick Wiseman. Both are having banner years: first Godard with his astonishing, form-bending Goodbye ...
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“Horns”
In a time when cinema has become almost exclusively a cynical and pat medium, in which marketability foregoes the quality of the product being sold, originality has become a mythic, widely discarded possibility. The concept that every story has already been to...
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“Citizenfour”
One of 2014’s more compelling documentaries, Laura Poitras’ Citizenfour channels the measured cool of its subject—former National Security Agency analyst-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden—and eschews the sensationalism of so many docs for a chilling, informa...
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“White Bird in a Blizzard”
A good mystery is never about the reveal. The reveal is a backdrop, or a catalyst for characters to be jerked out of complacency and into orbit. Circumstances of chaos and desperation deliver them from one point to another, always the same shore, regardless of...
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“Listen Up Philip”
What an asshole.
At not yet 35 years old, Philip Lewis Friedman (Jason Schwartzman) is about to publish his second novel. He lives in New York City with his beautiful, fashion-photographer girlfriend Ashley (Elisabeth Moss), who has supported Philip for the...
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“Birdman”
Note. This review was originally published as part of our New York Film Festival coverage.
It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s…a disgruntled Michael Keaton? Closing out this year's New York Film Festival is director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Birdman. A fant...
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“Bird People” Battles Loneliness, Finds Hope
One of the weird paradoxes of film is that those experiences that are the most common and often meaningful in our daily lives are almost impossible to evoke visually in a real and engaging way. The most difficult acts to represent on film in a realistic way ar...
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“Rocks in My Pockets” An Encouraging, Delightfully Morbid Animated Memoir
Since the turn of the millennium, cartooning has exploded as a medium for autobiography. The acceptance of comic books as an art form and the possibilities offered by the Internet have made it possible for anyone halfway decent with a drawing tablet to become ...
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“Wetlands” A Spectacularly Septic Laugh- and Cringefest
Finally a film that addresses the age-old, burning, itching question: Can romance exist in the wake of an anal fissure? Opening in U.S. cities this month like a fresh, gaping wound is Wetlands, a spectacularly septic coming-of-age story from Germany that revel...
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