7 years ago
All posts by Daniel Carlson
“Forrest Gump” Keeps Running Away
Forrest Gump is never sure of what it is or what it wants to be. Directed by Robert Zemeckis from a script by Eric Roth (reshaping Winston Groom’s novel), the film is an ungainly mix of cheap drama, unearned sentimentality, and questionable humor that asks the...
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Criterion Goes Pop
Criterion claims to collect "important contemporary and classic films." To fully do that, it's high time they accepted pop cinema.
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“The Trip to Italy” Puts Too Much On Its Plate
The Trip, which began life as a 6-episode BBC series and was subsequently cut down to a feature for festival and home video distribution, was a study in contrasts. Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon played lightly fictionalized versions of themselves as two actors co...
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“About Alex” and the Way We Live Now
It sounds familiar: a group of upwardly mobile, mostly white friends reconvene a few years after college and wind up bringing old loves and regrets to light. There are quite a few movies like this, but they all huddle together in the shadow of the 1983's The B...
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A Talented Cast Can’t Save “Sex Tape”
The most frustrating movies are not those that are outright bad, but those that come so close to being good, only to fail. They find themselves bumping against good ideas almost without trying, only to forget them or wander away in search of something nonsensi...
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“Video Games: The Movie” Presses All the Wrong Buttons
It takes a certain mix of hubris and willful ignorance to begin a documentary about video games with a quote from Gandhi. The bluntly titled Video Games: The Movie, after an introductory montage of gameplay footage (one of the many that pads the film), transit...
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“Premature” Too Sticky In Its Execution Despite a High Concept
It's no accident that every review of Premature refers to the film within the context of its relationship to Harold Ramis’s Groundhog Day. The new film’s narrative similarity to the older one — in both, the protagonist finds himself reliving the same day witho...
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