7 years ago
Featured (10 posts found)
“Minions”
Children, those little clay-lumps upon whom pop culture can imprint with unmatched ease, probably shouldn’t be allowed around Minions. The little yellow pill-shaped hellions that star in this spin-off of upstart animation studio Illumination’s runaway success ...
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“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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“Terminator: Genisys”
To watch James Cameron’s 1984 The Terminator again is to marvel at its ruthless narrative efficiency and the craft of making a great deal out of very little. It’s such a tightly scripted, self-contained little B-movie masterpiece that the film demanded a serie...
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“Ted 2”
Asking whether we really needed a sequel to 2012’s Ted is almost unfair to Ted 2. Sequels, follow-ups, and part twos (and threes and fours) make up an ever-increasing percentage of our moviegoing diet these days. Questioning their necessity has nearly become r...
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The Dark Side of Popular Music In Modern Cinema
Mia Hansen-Love’s new film Eden is a decades-spanning epic of a recent niche cultural past: the rise of French house music in the 1990s and 2000s. Eden is not a docudrama like The Doors, a biopic like Ray or a generic “scene survey” such as the millennial rave...
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The King and the Fool: Robin Williams in “The Fisher King”
Robin Williams’s suicide last August kicked off the latest round of handwringing over the received wisdom that the funniest comedians often suffer from overwhelming depression. But as shocking as the entertainer’s death was, Williams could never really bury hi...
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“Jaws” At 40
Few directors have a filmography with as many highlights as Steven Spielberg, and few of his films transfer so cleanly from one decade to the next as his 1975 film Jaws. Spielberg’s first major feature at the helm, which is turning the corner on 40 years since...
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SNL in Review: “The Blues Brothers”
In SNL IN REVIEW, we look back at some of the notable cinematic efforts from Saturday Night Live alums, and place them in context of the actor-comedian’s career.
The release of last week’s Live from New York! followed February’s much-publicized Saturday Night...
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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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“Eden”
On the surface, Mia Hansen-Løve’s exquisite, delicately nostalgic film Eden is a personal homage to the “French Touch” generation that gives electronic music its long-overdue eulogy in cinema. It is a beautiful, slick, and streamlined surface, ripe with melanc...
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