8 years ago
Theatrical (10 posts found)
Coming to a theater near you
“Room” Is Vivid and Poignant
Note. This review was originally published as part of our 2015 Toronto International Film Festival coverage.
Going into Room not knowing anything about the Emma Donoghue novel on which it’s based, I found myself, in its opening moments, forced into the proces...
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“Truth” Is Just Embarrassing
The public could stand to have a better idea of actually went on with the 2004 60 Minutes scandal over George W. Bush’s military service record. The sequence of embarrassments centered around the news program’s story, released just two months before a presiden...
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“Crimson Peak” Is A New High For Guillermo del Toro
Guillermo del Toro will not be mistaken. He’d very much like for his new film, the magnificently wrought Crimson Peak, to not be spoken of as a horror film. On Twitter, he clarified that the film is a “Gothic Romance,” and then compared its tense creepiness to...
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“Bridge of Spies” Is Snarky and Suspenseful
Bridge of Spies is the true story of James Donovan, an insurance claims lawyer tasked with negotiating the release of a military pilot shot down over enemy lines during the height of the Cold War. Directed by Steven Spielberg, with a screenplay assist from Joe...
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“Trash” Is Almost Predictably Lousy
First, a brief moment to note the pun-tastic woes of Rooney Mara, co-starring in two critically disliked films opening on the same day, helpfully titled Pan and Trash. These folks make it awfully easy for us sometimes. As a pal pointed out, this is actually t...
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“Knock Knock” Is Funnier Than It Is Scary
In Eli Roth’s home-invasion thriller Knock Knock, Keanu Reeves plays Evan Webber, a wholesome husband and dad who temporarily loses his sanity and indulges in temptation. The film is reasonably suspenseful at a decently sustained pace, but it’s more amusing th...
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“Pan” Is A Cut Above Other Fantasy Reimaginings
J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan already had one notorious reimagining in Steven Spielberg’s Hook, and the existence of Joe Wright’s new “prequel” immediately conjures the specter of the dreadful Oz the Great and Powerful: both involve a contrived origin story about th...
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The Single-Take “Victoria” Is A Singular Achievement
It’s a sorry state of affairs when a foreign film’s best recourse to cut through the cacophonous blare of new releases in a given week is to highlight its central gimmick, as Victoria’s tagline boasts: “One girl. One city. One night. One take.” The single take...
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“The Forbidden Room” Is A Freewheeling Achievement
Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson’s The Forbidden Room is a tribute to a film that never existed. More accurately, it is a supercut of various fictional films—a stitched-together collage of associative links and vague thematic consistency. From one point of view, th...
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“The Final Girls” Is Deliciously Wicked and Surprising
It’s not every day that you walk into a horror movie expecting it to make you choke up. Usually, we pay the price of admission to scare ourselves silly and enjoy some good old-fashioned exploitative voyeurism; we watch imperiled characters get bumped off with ...
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