8 years ago
All posts by Daniel Carlson
The Bright But Uncertain Future of Film Criticism
Film reviews are tricky things. As a critic, you have to explain enough of what happens in a movie to give readers an idea of what to expect, but that plot description has to be balanced with analysis unless you want to wind up with a flat recap. You have to r...
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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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When Axel Rose: “Beverly Hills Cop” at 30
It’s impossible to overstate, even 30 years later, how huge Eddie Murphy was in 1984. After starting stand-up as a teenager and joining Saturday Night Live in 1980 when he was just 19, he continued to grow his stardom in 1982 with his first comedy album and hi...
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“Interstellar”
Christopher Nolan has never been one for tearjerkers. As a filmmaker, he brings a technician’s focus to his work, laying out the parts he wants to use and methodically assembling his machine. His stories almost always involve loss or sorrow, but such emotions ...
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“Before I Go to Sleep”
There’s a resigned manner in the way Before I Go to Sleep plays out. Running a trim 92 minutes and with a credited cast of just nine actors plus stunt people, it’s a small, rote mystery about a woman with amnesia, Christine Lucas (Nicole Kidman), who sets out ...
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“Fury”
If there’s a throughline to David Ayer's more personal works, it’s the struggle for fighting men to stay honest while convincing themselves that the horrors they visit upon the enemy are righteous and necessary. He makes films about moral compromise, and speci...
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“Rudderless”
It would be easy and more than a little cruel to make a joke about the aimlessness of a movie called Rudderless, and indeed, there are lengthy sections of the film that feel unmoored. Directed by William H. Macy, helming his first feature, and co-written by Ma...
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Days of Future Past: Looking Back at Shane Carruth’s “Primer” After 10 Years
When Primer was released in 2004, Shane Carruth—the film’s writer, director, producer, composer, editor, and one of its two main actors—was barely past 30, and he’d spent a couple of years assembling the film on his laptop for a final production cost of about ...
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“The Equalizer”
The Equalizer is many things — grotesquely violent, relentlessly grim, proudly empty-headed — but maybe its most notable aspect is the way it messily jams its influences together in an unsuccessful attempt to become a good movie by trying to look and sound lik...
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“Bird People” Battles Loneliness, Finds Hope
One of the weird paradoxes of film is that those experiences that are the most common and often meaningful in our daily lives are almost impossible to evoke visually in a real and engaging way. The most difficult acts to represent on film in a realistic way ar...
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