8 years ago
The Canon (10 posts found)
Modern essentials
“Stinking Heaven”
A sober-living safe house is neither safe nor sober in Stinking Heaven, the fifth feature (and fourth in 3 years) from director Nathan Silver. The New York-based filmmaker’s wonderfully caustic sense of humor and fetish for familial and social dysfunction are ...
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“A Most Violent Year”
Watching JC Chandor’s expertly crafted period crime drama A Most Violent Year, it’s likely you’ll say to yourself, “this is good, but I feel like I’ve seen it before.” This is an understandable reaction, and one that might even persist after the film’s explosi...
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“The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness”
Spectres of the past line the halls of Studio Ghibli. The frames of The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, Mami Sunada’s documentary about the studio’s rush to complete Hayao Miyazaki’s 2013 film The Wind Rises, are decorated with them. A sketch of Kiki hovers ove...
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“Leviathan”
Leviathan, the pitch-black new film from Elena director Andrey Zvyagintsev, is bookended by montages of startling, almost cosmically withering imagery. Chilled to prehistoric temperature in the blues and grays of Mikhail Krichman’s photography, it opens wide i...
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“Two Days, One Night”
In discussing Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s altogether remarkable Two Days, One Night, it’s indeed tempting to praise the movie for all the things it doesn’t do. This is a film of uncommon emotional directness, of simple truths presented unadorned. The Belgia...
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“Selma”
Note. This review originally ran as part of our coverage of the AFI Fest.
Ava DuVernay’s Selma is a joyful, angry, and sad film-- occasionally all three in the same scene. It’s smart, soulful, and deeply affecting, boasting some truly powerhouse moments and...
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“Winter Sleep”
“I’ve never had a spare second to be bored,” exclaims Aydin (Haluk Bilginer), the protagonist of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s dauntingly titled, 197-minute long Palme d’Or winner, Winter Sleep. It’s a sentiment mirroring what one feels about the gargantuan and wordy fi...
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“Song of the Sea”
There was once a time, not so long ago, when hand-drawn animation wasn’t so hard to find in feature films. Even during the early years of the 2000s, Walt Disney Animation Studios and competitors like DreamWorks Animation and Paramount were making traditionally...
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“The Imitation Game”
“Are you paying attention?” asks a brisk voice at the start of Morten Tyldum’s slick and sophisticated World War II-era biopic The Imitation Game. The voice belongs to the genius WWII code-breaker and math prodigy Alan Turing, the magnificent subject of Graham...
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“Foxcatcher”
In the films of Bennett Miller, the truth is in the silence. The indelible image of Capote is of Philip Seymour Hoffman sitting forward in his seat, listening and trying to comprehend the mind of a murderer. In Moneyball, it's the silence around the scouting t...
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