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Recent Reviews
- Good Kill – An artistic exploration of drone assassinations
- Citizenfour – a fascinating and important topic, but a disappointing documentary
- Interstellar – Probably the best film of the year, certainly the most enjoyable!
- Laggies – a delightful little film about late-blooming misfits
- Two Days, One Night – it’s (almost) exactly what you expect it to be
- Whiplash – a disgusting, stupidly manipulative piece of absurdity.
- Still Alice – big stars, big production, but still just a Hallmark movie of the week
- Wild – it’s surprisingly well-made and fun to watch
- Black Sea – diverting, but sadly predictable
- Birdman (Or the Expected Emptiness of Pretension)
- Mr. Turner – Planet of the Ape
- The Imitation Game – It’s an abomination
- A Brief Word on the 2014 Oscar-Nominated Animated Shorts
- Kill The Messenger – The important and tragic story of Gary Webb, the mainstream media, and the CIA
- This is Where I Leave You – the latest in a long line of “family reunion” movies
- A review of summer cinema – it was pretty grim!
- The Trip to Italy – It never should have been made
- A Most Wanted Man – Superficially entertaining, but poorly-made and overrated
- Magic in the Moonlight – It’s pissing me off!
- The Purge: Anarchy – Surprisingly, it’s rather good
- I Origins – ambitious and entertaining
- Boyhood – a bit one dimensional, but its one dimension is lovely, impressive and fun to experience
- Obvious Child – cute, dignified and gutsy
- Snowpiercer – a fantastic, riveting science fiction action allegory
- Edge of Tomorrow – it’s fairly entertaining
- Begin Again – confronting the future of pop music head-on
- The Fault in Our Stars – not super-moving, but definitely enjoyable
- Hellion – a gritty tale of fucked up parents and children
- Night Moves – a cool, subtle portrayal of hippy-liberal activism turned violent
- Cold In July – an outstandingly fun and unusual film, and a paean for the 1980s
- Austenland – so horrible, I’m speechless
- Elena – 80 minutes of torture
- Lucky Them – Toni Collette takes center stage and lights up the screen!
- Belle – it means well, but God is it slow (and dull)
- Finding Vivian Maier – an okay documentary on a fascinating artist
- The German Doctor (Wakolda) – Diverting, but feels more than a little contrived
- Chef – it’s heart is in the right place
- Jodorowsky’s Dune – a bizarre and amazing documentary
- Hateship, Loveship – it goes down well
- Divergent – entertaining, but there’s a lot wrong with it
Category Archives: 2013
Stories We Tell – It’s pretty good, but it’s far from great.
Stories We Tell opened in NYC this week (it opens in select theaters across the country next week.) My wife and I both enjoyed it, but I have to say I was not as deeply impressed as were the New York … Continue reading
Posted in 2013
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What Maisie Knew – a lovely little film about crap parenting
What Maisie Knew might not be a great film, but in its own way it’s a lovely piece of craftsmanship. Through its structuring and camerawork it manages to capture exactly what it is like to be a child in turbulent, scary circumstances … Continue reading
Posted in 2013
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To The Wonder – It’s quite moving, for a film with no dialog
As anyone who reads this blog knows, I am not exactly one for “image” films with no dialog. Eric Rohmer is my idea of film artistry – To The Wonder is the exact opposite of Eric Rohmer. Nevertheless, I have … Continue reading
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In The House (Dans la maison) – They squandered a brilliant idea.
In The House was wonderful for the first 20-30 minutes or so. By the end of the film I was pissed off and grumpy. The film’s story idea has so much potential: A semi-jaded literature teacher (and his semi-neurotic wife) … Continue reading
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42 – For this kind of sports movie, it’s not too bad.
42 is your typical, semi-schmaltzy, biographical sports movie, but it avoids many of the worst pitfalls that tend to plague this kind of film, and in the end it is quite enjoyable. It struck me as a fairly cursory but … Continue reading
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The Company You Keep – entertaining, with good actors, but held down by mediocre writing
The Company You Keep is a enjoyable movie – it has a fun story idea, they wrote some basically decent dialog, and it features a lot of really good, old actors who give nice performances and are fun to watch. … Continue reading
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Mental – a glorious breath of fresh air!
Watching Mental in the Village East Cinema the other night I was happily transported back to the glorious 1990’s Indie Renaissance. Absent were all the deplorable obsessions of modern comedy – poop humor, slapstick routines that have been beaten to death, post-Seinfeld humor, … Continue reading
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Admission – Worse than horrible!
Admission is so terrible, I don’t even know where to begin. I had just a few days before seen the horrible Ginger and Rosa, to which I went with somewhat hopeful expectations and from which I came away disappointed in … Continue reading
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Ginger and Rosa – Horrible!
I must say, 2013 is getting off to a really inauspicious start at the movies. It’s not just that nothing good has been released. These moves are so bad this year, I can barely find anything I’m even interested in … Continue reading
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Quartet – mediocre, but basically enjoyable
Quartet is an inoffensive little film that stubbornly refuses to be anything more than that. The main problem with the film is the script – character development is clumsy, the humor is sadly flat, and the intellectual content is kind of dull … Continue reading
Posted in 2013
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