7 years ago
Reviews (10 posts found)
The Big Wedding Is a Big Failure
Some scripts can be saved by a good cast that delivers the material with as much chutzpah as possible. And then there are some that are simply unsalvageably dreadful. The Big Wedding is one of those scripts. Primarily based on a French comedy called Mon frère ...
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Tribeca Review: Taboor
B-
Vahid Vakilifar's Taboor is a film defined more by what's absent on screen than the images and sounds themselves. There's very little spoken text, and only one scene that might be dialogue rather than voiceover. It takes place in what appears to be a pos...
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Arthur Newman Plumbs the Depths of Blandness
C-
Different films aspire for different things. Some movies want to be sprawling epics. Some want to be emotional powerhouses. Some want to win Oscars. Some want to win the box office. But sometimes, all a movie wants to be is a nice, swell, inoffensive tim...
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Michael Bay’s Pain and Gain Explores the Destructive Depths of the American Dream (No, Seriously)
A-
“I don’t just want everything you have. I want you not to have it.”
Masculinity, materialism and the American Dream are themes often explored by Hollywood cinema. Michael Bay’s new film, Pain and Gain, brings those themes together, marries them with t...
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Oblivion: Science Fiction Comfort Food
B+
Oblivion is familiar territory, both for Cruise and for the science fiction genre. It unquestionably remains devoted first and foremost to delivering stylish visuals and gorgeous imagery, yet unlike Tron: Legacy's emptiness, second-time feature director ...
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Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color is Uniquely Transcendent
A
There have been some very good and even great films released so far this year, but Upstream Color may just be the first "must-see" movie of 2013. No matter what anyone's interpretation of the film is going to be--and there will most certainly be more than...
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Wojciech Smarzowski’s Powerful Rose Playing at MoMI
A
One of the strongest movies to come out of the Polish film industry in the past 10 years, Wojciech Smarzowski’s Rose plunges head-first into the inchoate mess of the immediate post-war period in Eastern Europe: a time so sensitive – not to mention banned...
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Danny Boyle’s Stylish Trance Leaves You Spellbound
B+
Danny Boyle is one of the only directors working today who can literally do any genre he pleases and display a wide range of talents while still keeping his own signature stamp on all of them. Between horror films (28 Days Later), family films (Millions)...
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Terrence Malick Takes Us On A Journey To the Wonder
There's a line in Terrence Malick's latest film To the Wonder in which Olga Kurylenko's Marina finds herself at the precipice of despair and says "My god... what a cruel war. I find two women inside me. One full of love for you... the other pulls me down towar...
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Old-Fashioned and Sentimental Jackie Robinson Bio-Picture 42 Effectively Pulls At The Heartstrings
B
Through the annals of time Jackie Robinson has become much more than a hall-of-fame baseball player. He’s evolved into a beloved hero, a symbol of hope for those who felt hopeless, an individualist who needed virtually no one and inspired just about everyon...
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