8 years ago
The Canon (10 posts found)
Modern essentials
‘Frances Ha’
Like seemingly all things about the twentysomethings of this generation, Frances Ha is either going to deeply resonate with you, leave you completely cold, or flat-out infuriate you. Adding more to this polarization is that it's co-written and directed by Noah...
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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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‘Stories We Tell’
Narrative is the way we relate to the world and to each other. We tell stories to communicate ideas, and to relate the events and emotions we experience. We tell stories to hold on to our memories. Sarah Polley’s new film, Stories We Tell, is an exploration of...
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Michael Bay’s Pain and Gain Explores the Destructive Depths of the American Dream (No, Seriously)
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“I don’t just want everything you have. I want you not to have it.”
Masculinity, materialism and the American Dream are themes often explored by Hollywood cinema. Michael Bay’s new film, Pain and Gain, brings those themes together, marries them with t...
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Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color is Uniquely Transcendent
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There have been some very good and even great films released so far this year, but Upstream Color may just be the first "must-see" movie of 2013. No matter what anyone's interpretation of the film is going to be--and there will most certainly be more than...
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Wojciech Smarzowski’s Powerful Rose Playing at MoMI
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One of the strongest movies to come out of the Polish film industry in the past 10 years, Wojciech Smarzowski’s Rose plunges head-first into the inchoate mess of the immediate post-war period in Eastern Europe: a time so sensitive – not to mention banned...
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Terrence Malick Takes Us On A Journey To the Wonder
There's a line in Terrence Malick's latest film To the Wonder in which Olga Kurylenko's Marina finds herself at the precipice of despair and says "My god... what a cruel war. I find two women inside me. One full of love for you... the other pulls me down towar...
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Blu-Ray Review of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
How fitting it is that The Criterion Collection should release Monsieur Verdoux and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp on Blu-Ray in the same month. Both are films respectively searching for morality in World War II’s wake and midst, crafting two of the riche...
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The Power of Communication is Alive and Well in the Sublime Extraordinary Stories
Extraordinary Stories begins with an ordinary sight, of a man walking in medium-close-up down a dirt road in an extended shot. An off-screen narrator stresses the unremarkable banality of this man (played by director Mariano Llinás), whom he names only X amid ...
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Family and Fate Converge in the Intimate Epic The Place Beyond the Pines
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Two years ago, Derek Cianfrance made his narrative feature debut with the emotionally-charged, uncomfortable-yet-beautiful romantic drama Blue Valentine, which was about the despair and devastation of romantic relationships and the pain they leave behind...
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