8 years ago
All posts by Dan Schindel
“99 Homes” Is Ungraceful and Bland
Ripped from the headlines of several years ago and plastered onto theater screens is 99 Homes, which transmutes the subprime-mortgage crisis into a broad morality play. Writer/director Ramin Bahrani has recently made it his “thing” to bring forth relevant mess...
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“Goodnight Mommy” Fails To Come Together As A Horror Film
Even though its story isn’t what the virally-spooky trailers are selling it as, this still seems like the kind of movie I should love. An austerely produced, beautifully shot dark fable about children’s resentment of their parents, it’s sound on paper. But in ...
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“Grandma” Is A Perfectly Nice Vehicle for Lily Tomlin
It’s been 27 years since Lily Tomlin last had a leading role in a film. Let’s not do that again, okay? In Grandma, the actress both embraces and subtly toys with the archetype of the irascible senior citizen. Her character, Ellie Reid, is liable to brusquely i...
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“Station to Station” Is A Half-Assed and Artificial Hodgepodge
Station to Station has a reasonably intriguing premise: A train travels from New York to San Francisco, and over the 24 days this takes, various artists and musicians are brought aboard to contribute their thoughts on, and expressions of, creativity. Beck, Jac...
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“Mistress America” Is Fresh, Original, and Marvelous
In Mistress America, writers Noah Baumbach, who also directs, and Greta Gerwig, who also stars, have harmonized their distinct voices into something marvelous. Millennial communication patterns—a constant, rapid shuffle between angst, oversharing, self-mytholo...
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“The Diary of a Teenage Girl” Is As Messy As Other Indie Teen Sex Dramedies
It's 1976 and, as she enthuses to her tape-recorder diary, 15-year-old Minnie Goetze (Bel Powley) has just had sex for the first time—with her mother’s (Kristen Wiig) boyfriend, Monroe (Alexander Skarsgård). Based on the hybrid graphic novel/regular novel by P...
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“Best of Enemies” Is A Shallow Look At A Political Pair
There was a time I fervently believed that there were no bad documentary subjects -- only bad documentaries. That anything could make for a good narrative, that any person could make for an interesting protagonist. A lot has changed since that time of my life ...
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“10,000 km”
At the beginning of 10,000 km, Alex (Natalia Tena) and Sergi (David Verdaguer) have sex, express their mutual hope that said coitus will result in a baby, and then go about their morning routine in their Barcelona apartment. All of this occurs over the course ...
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“Tangerine”
Note. This review originally ran as part of our coverage of the 2015 Sundance Film Festival.
Much of the buzz around Tangerine at Sundance has concerned how the movie was shot: entirely on an iPhone 5s. Which is a deft distraction from the fact that it also f...
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“Cartel Land”
The drug war in Mexico has raged for nearly a decade and claimed more than 100,000 lives, but America media has been contemptibly reticent to give it much significant coverage. Even documentarians, generally on the forefront on social issues, have been relucta...
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