8 years ago
All posts by Jesse Knight
Enigmatic Documentary ‘The Institute’ More Head-Scratching Than Mind-Bending
A city already as inviting and majestic as San Francisco is transformed into a grand-scale playground in The Institute, a chronicling of a mysterious organization and its unwitting “inductees” in the late 2000s. Strange flyers posted around town led potential ...
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‘Hell Baby’ A Horror Comedy With Neither Horror Nor Comedy
“From the makers of ‘Reno 911!’”, which Hell Baby purports to be, is a bit of a mislead. The long-running Comedy Central show about witless police officials was a collaborative effort between an expansive cast of improvisers with varying styles and voices, aid...
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Why Harvey Weinstein’s Neutering of Bong Joon-ho’s ‘Snowpiercer’ Is An Insult To Us All
When I caught wind that Bong Joon-ho, the South Korean auteur behind complex genre masterworks The Host, Mother and Memories of Murder, had a new film coming out this year, it was enough to immediately become my most anticipated release of 2013. Bong is that k...
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Jeff Garlin’s ‘Dealin’ With Idiots’: With Friends Like These, Who Needs A Script?
There is hardly a more affable presence in comedy today than Jeff Garlin. The Chicago-born standup comic has gained notoriety for his near-omnipresence in television and film, both behind and in front of the camera, with ties that vary from underground absurdi...
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Glitz, Gloss and Flesh in Michael Winterbottom’s Shapely ‘The Look of Love’
Director Michael Winterbottom and actor Steve Coogan's latest unorthodox biopic is yet another dizzying, boundlessly engaging achievement from the as-of-yet inextinguishable pairing behind 24 Hour Party People, Tristram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story and The ...
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Korean Import ‘The Tower’ Can’t Stand On Its Own
There are remakes and there are reboots, and then there are carbon copies like The Tower, a new-to-DVD Korean import that shamelessly reinterprets the 1974 American disaster epic The Towering Inferno for modern-day audiences. It’s needlessly familiar and hardl...
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Neil Jordan’s Fireball Comedy ‘The Butcher Boy’ Rages On
Rarely is digging through a filmmaker's oeuvre so replete with unpredictability and splendor as the grab bag of Neil Jordan. For a director who has regularly surveyed themes of aberrant sexuality, hometown conflict and religious repudiation within a multitude ...
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‘V/H/S/2’
A sequel's existence is rarely justified beyond capitalizing on the success of its original, and because hits (outside of superheroes and beloved book series, for example) can be unexpected, their follow-ups are usually hollow ticket bait. Sequelmakers often n...
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‘Frances Ha’
The opening credits of Noah Baumbach’s last feature, 2010’s Greenberg, play over lingering shots of the film’s co-star Greta Gerwig as she drives around Los Angeles to the tune of Steve Miller Band’s “Jet Airliner”. The shot is unbroken, in profile and close u...
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Titular Characters: How the Wrong Font Can Destroy a Film
Don’t judge a book by its cover.
It’s a phrase we heard ad nauseum growing up, even before we learned how to read the blocks we’d arranged in our playpen, let alone an entire book. Eventually, of course, it became clear that the phrase had other, more univers...
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