8 years ago
Theatrical (10 posts found)
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“Arabian Nights, Vol. 2” Is Comparatively Straightforward
The first volume of Miguel Gomes’s sprawling epic, Arabian Nights, has the unenviable task of bringing the audience on board with the filmmaker’s wild vision and convince them to remain on board for another four hours. Establishing his perspective alongside Pr...
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“Body” Is Ultimately Robbed of Suspense
Horror films often invite their viewers to consider the question of “What would I do?” They force us to think about our actions and our potential outcomes in an insane alternate reality where we’re characters in, for example, a slasher narrative. Body, the deb...
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“Youth” Leaves a Bland Aftertaste
Considering its talent, lush beauty, and quietly simmering passion, Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth leaves a rather bland aftertaste. The artful film aims to be an exercise on aging and the diminishing currency of self-worth over time. Yet, its ideas are insinuated a...
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“Chi-Raq” Is A Glorious Provocation
Spike Lee doesn’t always make it easy for us fans. His restless, prolific output can often swerve from brilliant to asinine, sometimes within the space of a single movie, sometimes within the space of a single scene. But stick with the guy long enough and ever...
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“Macbeth” Is Closer to Bro-etry Than Poetry
For a minor auteurist work, Roman Polanski’s adaptation of Macbeth may be one of the most influential films of the last 45 years. Polanski’s brutal vision brought Shakespeare’s grisly play back to its roots, retaining the prose but dispensing with the trite so...
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“Uncle Nick” Is Agonizingly Unfunny
There’s a famous story in which Errol Morris was taking so long to edit his film Gates of Heaven that Werner Herzog promised to eat his shoe if Morris ever finished the movie. This, of course, resulted in Les Blank’s delightful short Werner Herzog Eats His Sho...
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“Arabian Nights, Vol. 1” is Gloriously Messy
The Restless One, the first of three volumes that comprise Miguel Gomes’ ambitious six-hour long omnibus Arabian Nights, begins at a shipyard in Viana do Castelo, Portugal. The decaying infrastructure of the port and the frank, solemn tenor of the narrators’ v...
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“The World of Kanako” Is A Well-Organized Mess
Just in time for the holidays, here’s a slice of existential parental terror: The World of Kanako, Japanese filmmaker Tetsuya Nakashima’s follow-up to his 2010 film, Confessions. That picture made the AMPAS shortlist for Best Foreign Language Film back in 2011...
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“Hitchcock/Truffaut” Functions As A Serviceable Primer
With Hitchcock/Truffaut, Kent Jones, one of our greatest living film critics and programmers, has once again forayed into documentary filmmaking. Hitchcock/Truffaut is adapted from a 1967 book of the same name written by François Truffaut—a book that has long ...
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“The Danish Girl” Is Pristinely Inoffensive
In its presentation, The Danish Girl—Tom Hooper’s portrait of Lili Elbe, a transgender woman and the first known recipient of sex-reassignment surgery—is a fairly standard coming-of-age story that follows Einar (Eddie Redmayne) and his wife Gerde (Alicia Vikan...
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