8 years ago
All posts by Luke Goodsell
“Amy”
A sad air of familiarity and a creeping sense of ghoulishness conspire to sink Asif Kapadia’s Amy, an otherwise well-intentioned look at a tragic pop star that’s as frustrating as it is curious. Struggling to strike the balance between life celebration and dow...
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“The Tribe”
Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s The Tribe has ridden an enticing hook—it’s performed entirely in sign language, with no subtitles—to considerable critical and festival acclaim. But is there much to it beyond the admittedly fascinating formal gimmick? While it’s temp...
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“Hungry Hearts”
It used to be that filmmakers served up witchcraft, mutant babies, and the Devil himself as allegories for the anxieties of new parenthood. In Saverio Costanzo’s Hungry Hearts, we get something both blander and possibly more frightening: the 21st-century obses...
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“The Ladies of the House”
Fans of late-night grindhouse fare will likely get a kick from The Ladies of the House, a by-turns sleazy and playful horror movie love-in that splits the difference between pseudo-feminist yuks and traditionally icky exploitation. The debut feature from the f...
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“Mad Max: Fury Road”
It begins with the sound of a machine and ends on the image of a revolution. Thirty years after his hero walked off into a nuclear sunset, George Miller returns for more than just a greatest-hits package, orchestrating a go-for-broke action symphony that’s als...
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“Saint Laurent”
“We are bodies without souls,” the iconic couturier Yves Saint Laurent writes at one point in Bertrand Bonello’s new film, “because the soul is elsewhere.” Where most biopics spend so much energy cramming in narrative detail that their subject eludes them, Sai...
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“Far from the Madding Crowd”
“All the women who are independent,” declares Bathsheba Everdene (Carey Mulligan) early on in Far from the Madding Crowd, “throw your hands up at me!” Okay, maybe she doesn’t quite say that, but halfway through Thomas Vinterberg’s handsome, unremarkable new ta...
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“Iris”
It’s somewhat bittersweet that Albert Maysles’ Iris arrives in theaters just weeks after the much-lamented passing of the great documentarian, but as penultimate send-offs go, it’s a delight. (His final film, In Transit, just screened at the Tribeca Film Festi...
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“The Age of Adaline”
There’s an endearing scene midway through The Age of Adaline, the new time-hopping romantic drama starring Blake Lively, in which two lovers swoon in the back of a 1930s convertible at an abandoned movie theater, marveling at the constellation of phosphorescen...
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“Lost River”
Some movies arrive in body bags, crushed under the weight of toxic advance word to which too many critics, eager to join the consensus pile-on, gleefully align themselves. Since its catastrophic reception at Cannes nearly a year ago, Ryan Gosling’s directorial...
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