8 years ago
All posts by Sean Burns
“Before I Disappear”
Writer-director Shawn Christensen’s 2012 Oscar-winning short Curfew was a striking miniature. The filmmaker starred as a drug-addled layabout whose latest suicide attempt was interrupted by a phone call from his estranged sister, pressing him into emergency ba...
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“Happy Valley”
Don’t expect to learn anything new about the Penn State scandal from Happy Valley, a deeply unsettling documentary from director Amir Bar-Lev. The facts are here, pretty much as we followed them on the news a few years back, when assistant football coach Jerry...
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“John Wick”
For all its B-movie pulp bravado, John Wick – a rather absurdly entertaining comeback vehicle for the preternaturally youthful Keanu Reeves – is best looked at not as an action movie, but as a dance picture.
Directed by Reeves’ regular stunt double Chad Sta...
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“Listen Up Philip”
What an asshole.
At not yet 35 years old, Philip Lewis Friedman (Jason Schwartzman) is about to publish his second novel. He lives in New York City with his beautiful, fashion-photographer girlfriend Ashley (Elisabeth Moss), who has supported Philip for the...
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“Men, Women & Children”
We begin in outer space.
After kicking off with a pompous, Malick-esque montage of Voyager 1 departing the solar system for parts unknown, director Jason Reitman’s sixth feature plummets back to Earth just in time to catch Adam Sandler rubbing it out to Por...
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“Atlas Shrugged: Who Is John Galt?” Review
“The left hopes no one goes to the theater this weekend. They don’t want their own collectivist mentality compared with Rand’s belief in the individual. They do not want her integrity of thought to reach the sunlight. The result of their philosophy is the mess...
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“The Skeleton Twins” An Uncannily Convincing Portrait of Dysfunctional Siblings
I recall reading an interview with Bill Murray a couple years back in which he praised the then-current cast of Saturday Night Live. (Of course I can’t find it right now for reference purposes, because searching for anything on the Internet related to Bill Mur...
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“Last Days in Vietnam” Flattens the Fall of Saigon into Bland Apologia
A riveting tale told in the most pedestrian and unimaginative fashion possible, director Rory Kennedy’s Last Days in Vietnam squanders some stunning archival footage and a few heartbreaking interviews, flattening the Fall of Saigon into an oatmeal-bland apolog...
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“Kelly & Cal” A Cozy Indie That Should’ve Been Pricklier
For those of us who came of age in the early 90s watching Juliette Lewis’ wackadoo wild-child performances --from Cape Fear to Natural Born Killers and beyond– it’s pretty much impossible to imagine her as somebody’s mom. The amusing central conceit of Kelly &...
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History of Film: 8 1/2
I came to Federico Fellini’s 8½ late, but not for lack of trying.
As a dutiful student of Roger Ebert’s Movie Home Companion -- in those antediluvian pre-Internet days the annual installments were bestowed upon me as a Christmas gift every year, then I’d sp...
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