7 years ago
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“American Sniper”
Warning. Spoilers regarding real-life figures lay within.
In his career-best, the 2006 war saga Letters from Iwo Jima (the companion to Flags of our Fathers), Clint Eastwood zeroed in on the story of a Japanese baker-turned-soldier named Saigo (Kazunari Nin...
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This Revolution Goes On and On: Director Ava DuVernay on Her New Film “Selma”
There have been a number of groundbreaking films released in 2014, but when racial injustice has become all the more frequent within contemporary American society, no other motion picture feels quite as important, or as timely, as Selma, the latest from Ava Du...
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“Selma”
Note. This review originally ran as part of our coverage of the AFI Fest.
Ava DuVernay’s Selma is a joyful, angry, and sad film-- occasionally all three in the same scene. It’s smart, soulful, and deeply affecting, boasting some truly powerhouse moments and...
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Come Fail with Us: “The Life Aquatic” at 10
I first saw The Life Aquatic in late 2004, when it premiered at the Winifred Moore Auditorium as part of the Webster University Film series. The exhibitors had supplied the university with boxes of souvenir caps baring the film’s title and a distinctive traffi...
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“The Interview”
Well, this is awkward. I saw a movie before I was supposed to, and now it’s a movie that isn’t coming out. I got an early screening invite from a fellow critic that might have been one of the last public screenings of a $40 million comedy starring big name act...
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Bye Bye Life: “All That Jazz” as Film Criticism
“Sometimes I don’t know where the bullshit ends and the truth begins.” Neither do any of us, really, but so few eviscerate our own lives with the kind of crackling critical energy that Bob Fosse did. As Angelique (Jessica Lange), his own personal angel of deat...
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“Annie”
It recently came to my attention that my fellow film critics don’t think much of John Huston’s massive, gargantuan 1982 adaptation of the Broadway musical Annie. Sadly, I must recuse myself from this particular conversation in accordance with my brilliant frie...
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“The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies”
Do you remember that pulse of excitement you felt when New Line and Warner Bros. first announced that they’d be adapting The Hobbit into a movie, a la The Lord of the Rings? Do you recall your anticipation as the project went, year by year, from being an idea ...
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The Prestige Freak Show: Eddie Redmayne’s Metamorphosis in “The Theory of Everything”
It’s the year of “Oscar’s metamorphosis,” Jenelle Riley beamed in the header of a recent Variety survey of the lead performances anchoring the season’s graduating class of prestige pictures. Reese Witherspoon, she noted, shed her sunshiny demeanour to play a r...
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High and Know: On Stoned-Logic and the Expansion of the Stoner Film
In “Film Genre and the Genre Film,” Thomas Schatz lays down a few organizing principles that make up a film genre. Basically, there’s a system of conventions that over time eventually codify into “rules” that clearly identify a genre—think a Western with its r...
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