8 years ago
All posts by Nick Allen
“Southpaw” Is The Equivalent of A Great White Dope
Southpaw starts at a name, but it’s not the titular boxing term this movie brandishes and emblematically forgets to define. It’s the lead character’s surname of Hope, a branding that dares filmmakers and audiences alike to take anything he does right on the no...
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Sven Hansen-Løve and Félix de Givry on “Eden”
Directed by Mia Hansen-Løve (Goodbye First Love, Father of My Children), Eden recreates the atmosphere of the house/garage music movement in early 1990s France. The surrogate of this experience is a DJ named Paul (Félix de Givry), who tempers his other life pr...
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“Love and Mercy”
Brian Wilson is one of the most extraordinary musicians to ever take on this world, given the lifetime of drama he’s endured and the masterpieces that he’s transported from inside his head into studio sessions. His life narrative of pop compositions, a lost ma...
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“Kill Me Three Times”
A tale of mistaken killers and coincidence becomes tediously tangled in Kriv Stenders’s Kill Me Three Times, a suicidal experiment with narrative. Cinema may arguably thrive on filmmakers’ abilities to pioneer new forms to present the same stories, but Stender...
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“5 To 7”
Nascent filmmakers sometimes fall into the trap of attempting to emulate the singular styles of Terrence Malick or Quentin Tarantino with diminishing returns. But it’s Woody Allen’s influence on film that has wrought irrevocable damage to the limited imaginati...
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“The Salt of the Earth”
A curious reunion of cinema with its ancestral art of photography, Wim Wenders’ co-directorial project The Salt of the Earth celebrates the life behind a cameraman's images. The film’s subject is world-renowned photographer Sebastião Salgado, an artful adventu...
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“Tracers”
Despite Hollywood’s occasional attempts at introducing parkour into the domestic action-genre landscape, that particular athletic style hasn’t quite taken off as hoped in America, for one reason or another. Understandably, it isn’t easy to center a film about ...
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“Road Hard”
Waving the flag of the persecuted non-PC American idiot, Adam Carolla is a gasbag, a babbler, and/or a loudmouth with nothing to say. Sans the reflective spotlight he puts on himself as actor/writer/co-director (sharing the two latter duties with Kevin Hench),...
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“The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel”
Don’t hold your breath, but the setting for this sequel to director John Madden’s The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is still the first title location, even though this new film spoils that a second one eventually comes into the picture. For the most part, the tou...
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“Kingsman: The Secret Service”
The mission of Kingsman: The Secret Service is to make the James Bond movie that has not been, to treat the earlier painfully-British entries from Sean Connery’s trilby-hat-wearing days with hyper action, while subsequently defying the broodiness of the Daniel...
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