8 years ago
All posts by Andy Crump
“The 33” Fails At Being Authentic
Patricia Riggen’s The 33 ends appropriately with a seaside reunion between its cast’s real-life counterparts: The cadre of Chilean miners who lived buried beneath a mountain for 69 days in the 2010 Copiapó mining calamity. One by one, Riggen introduces her aud...
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“The Hallow” Is Chillingly Effective
If you’re the type of person who avoids setting foot in a forest, you’ll probably feel validated by The Hallow, the debut from Irish filmmaker Corin Hardy. This is a horror film that treats the natural world as a source of mortal danger. Here there be monsters...
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Why “Beasts of No Nation” Is Merciless and Difficult to Watch
There are two integral components to any review of Beasts of No Nation: Its identity as a piece of art and its identity as a product of an industry experiencing post-millennial growing pains. “Netflix presents a Netflix original film,” the credits tell us befo...
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“The Final Girls” Is Deliciously Wicked and Surprising
It’s not every day that you walk into a horror movie expecting it to make you choke up. Usually, we pay the price of admission to scare ourselves silly and enjoy some good old-fashioned exploitative voyeurism; we watch imperiled characters get bumped off with ...
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“Addicted to Fresno” Has Surprisingly Little to Say
Nothing about Jamie Babbit’s Addicted to Fresno sounds bad on paper. Babbit has helmed episodes of Girls, Married, and Brooklyn Nine-Nine in her career, while her partner, Karey Dornetto, has penned installments of Portlandia and vintage Arrested Development; ...
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“Deathgasm” Is Gleefully Over-the-Top
It’s best to think of Jason Lei Howden’s Deathgasm as the spiritual kin of Brendon Small’s great Adult Swim series Metalocalypse. They’re both gleefully over-the-top odes to all things metal—from the music to its ethos and iconography. Metalocalypse ran from 2...
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“Mississippi Grind” Is A Toast to Beautiful Losers
Mississippi Grind is a low-stakes movie about high-stakes people who flirt with life and death. Films about gamblers tend toward the tragic more often than they do the comedic (Ocean’s Eleven films notwithstanding), but Mississippi Grind never quite imposes a ...
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“Turbo Kid” Is Deliberately, Willfully Cheesy And Dumb
The post-apocalyptic future of Turbo Kid might be set in 1997, but the film’s stylistic sensibility is straight from the 1980s. That’s the point, of course; the whole film is intended as an ode to the campy gewgaws of ’80s pop culture. It’s a movie that’s abou...
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“Digging for Fire” Is The Most Swanberg-ish Film Yet
With another year comes another Joe Swanberg joint about middle-class ennui. There are any number of reasons to roll one’s eyes at the prolific indie filmmaker’s latest, Digging For Fire—its blatant heteronormativity, adherence to traditional gender roles, uns...
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“Youth” Is A Stripped-Down, Minimalist Thriller
Brothers Shaul (Eitan Cunio) and Yaki (David Cunio) Cooper are as close as two siblings can be: They watch movies together, they pee together, and, when their family’s financial chips are down, they kidnap and ransom people together. Israeli filmmaker Tom Shov...
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