7 years ago
Theatrical (10 posts found)
Coming to a theater near you
“A LEGO Brickumentary” Feels More Like A Commercial
LEGOs are the little toy that could. What began as the brainchild of a Danish carpenter in the 1940s has gradually grown into a corporate powerhouse that generates $4 billion annually in revenue. The signature plastic blocks and yellow figurines are popping up...
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Locked Between Professional and Personal: On “The End of the Tour”
Early reports on James Ponsoldt’s sensitive, earnest The End Of The Tour tended to describe the film as something of a David Foster Wallace biopic--a notion abhorrent in literary circles that still hold up Wallace as an untouchable, multifaceted genius. Those ...
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“Paulo Coelho’s Best Story” Is Too Trite To Be His Best
Brazilian renaissance man Paulo Coelho has lived a life best described as quixotic. He’s well-known for penning The Alchemist, a slim tome that’s become the most widely translated novel by a living author. Left in the margins of his literary success are a vari...
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“Unexpected” Is Anything But
The ability to make babies is one of the defining differences between the sexes, but it isn’t the same for all women. In Unexpected, director Kris Swanberg attempts to explore how two women in radically different stages of life experience an unplanned pregnanc...
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“Southpaw” Is The Equivalent of A Great White Dope
Southpaw starts at a name, but it’s not the titular boxing term this movie brandishes and emblematically forgets to define. It’s the lead character’s surname of Hope, a branding that dares filmmakers and audiences alike to take anything he does right on the no...
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“The Vatican Tapes” Is A Cold Shower to Horror Fans
The rich symbolism and ethereal mystique of religions—especially of Catholicism—has fed the horror genre a steady diet of creepy material over the years. And no subgenre has been as direct a beneficiary of this as the exorcism subgenre. You know how it goes: A...
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“Paper Towns” Is A Crap-Crossed Love Story
Audiences get quite a bargain when buying a ticket for Jake Schreier’s new YA lit adaptation Paper Towns. These lucky viewers will see two movies for the price of one. At a run time of approximately 105 minutes, the first is an insufferably pseudo-quirky recit...
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“Phoenix” Is Both Preposterous And Haunting
How far will two people go to preserve their respective illusions? Chilling and tender in equal measure, German director Christian Petzold’s dark romance Phoenix is a study of post-World War II identity in flux, playing as both a preposterous melodrama and a m...
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“Big Significant Things” Is Kind of a Mess, In A Good Way
Channeling its theme of millennial ennui and disaffection, Bryan Reisberg’s handsomely crafted indie road trip comedy Big Significant Things has little to say, but says it with wit and style. Reisberg doesn’t pretend to have the answers, which doesn’t feel lik...
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On The Miraculous and Innovative “Horse Money”
Note. This review originally ran during our coverage of the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival.
Pedro Costa’s filmography can be seen not only as an unified body of work, but as something approaching a miracle. The incremental shifts in his working meth...
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