9 years ago
261 results found for: under the skin
“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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The Unbearable Sameness of “Ant-Man” and Marvel Movies
Hollywood churns out a lot of superhero movies, but then, they also churn out a lot of movies about, say, cops. Multiple times each year, multiplexes will run new releases about the boys in blue, and yet the public isn’t subjected to a deluge of thinkpieces ab...
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The Funny-As-Hell “Trainwreck” Is Anything But
“We all know one.” So goes the tagline for Trainwreck, comic phenom Amy Schumer’s debut starring vehicle with Judd Apatow. With the third season of Inside Amy Schumer in full swing and the comedian’s name seemingly plastered across the headline daily (sometime...
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Blu-ray Review: “Valerie and Her Week of Wonders”
Released just before the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia signaled the end of the country’s cinematic revolution, Jaromil Jires’s 1970 film Valerie and Her Week of Wonders has long been more known than seen. Residing in reputation somewhere between softcore ...
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Don Hertzfeldt: Beauty and Sadness in Bite-Sized Portions
Alissa Wilkinson has written about pop culture, politics, and religion all over the Internet. She is chief film critic at Christianity Today and assistant professor of English and humanities at The King's College in New York City. Based in Brooklyn, her work h...
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Birth of the Uncool: The Mind and Movies of Cameron Crowe
Cameron Crowe is a romantic. Since 1989, he’s made eight features as writer and director, and they’re all broadly similar, featuring sensitive white men in search for identity in a world that, to them, has temporarily lost meaning. But there’s more to Crowe’s ...
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Cannes Review: “Tale of Tales”
One has to admire Matteo Garrone’s Tale of Tales for its sheer audacity. It’s an ambitious attempt to bring the fairy tales of Giambattista Basile to life; stories which are among the oldest fairy tales on record, dating back to 1634. The earnestness that driv...
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Hot Docs 2015: Roundtable, Part 2
It’s no secret that filmmakers love making movies about making movies. For some, that self-reflexivity is a sign of cultural and artistic myopia. For others, though, turning the camera back on the process of filmmaking illuminates the bonds between art and hum...
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“What Now”
What Now, Ash Avildsen's debut as director, writer, and actor, explicitly invokes the name of Entourage only once. But every frame of this nigh-on unwatchable film is suffused with that ghastly program’s regressive gender politics, brutal absence of wit, under...
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Hot Docs 2015: Roundtable, Part 1
When we think about manifestations of evil in the world, we are most comfortable with those that are outside our realm of experience. Monsters in childrens’ stories, corrupt world leaders in faraway places, or flashy serial killers in our primetime TV shows. W...
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