Aloha
I dare you to watch the first 10 minutes of Almost Famous and not keep watching. It’s impossible. The music, the mood, the personal details – it all coalesces into a magnetic and believable story....
View ArticleSan Andreas
Just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse for San Francisco. Attacked by towering monsters and overrun by damn dirty apes, the City by the Bay hasn’t fared too well lately at the movies. But...
View ArticleTime Lapse
What would you do if you could see the future? The competent low-budget thriller Time Lapse follows three twenty-somethings who are investigating the mysterious disappearance of a neighbor when they...
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Revisit: La Dolce Vita
The paparazzi may have led to the death of Princess Diana, but those pesky photographers cemented the legacy of Anita Ekberg. The Swedish-Italian actress, who died in January at the age of 83, only...
View ArticleResults
Director Andrew Bujalski, known for his hyper-authentic, low-budget 16mm comedies about unexpected subsets of American life, enters the world of mainstream actors, digital cameras, and not-as-low...
View ArticleA Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence
With A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, Roy Andersson brings his “human being” trilogy, which began in 2000 with Songs from the Second Floor and continued with You, the Living in 2007,...
View ArticleFrom the Vaults of Streaming Hell: The Price of Gold
Fifty years after Susan Sontag’s essay “Notes on ‘Camp’”, camp has become a signifier for all things exaggerated, tacky or slightly off. From Ed Wood to John Waters, camp has evolved into a narrative...
View ArticleSpy
With Bridesmaids, Paul Feig entered a new phase of his already impressive career. His first hit film (after extensive directing for TV) was a female-centric response to the male-targeted gross-out...
View ArticleOeuvre: Herzog’s Feature Films: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Werner Herzog jumped on a seven-foot cactus after shooting wrapped on his second feature, Even Dwarfs Started Small. When one of the cast members was injured in a fire, the director promised “If all of...
View ArticleHungry Hearts
Jude (Adam Driver) and Mina (Alba Rohrwacher) meet in the bathroom of a Chinese restaurant in less than desirable circumstances: he has not done much to help the place’s stench, and the doors are stuck...
View ArticleJurassic World
So far this summer, the scoreboard reads Aussie post-apocalypse one, dinosaurs zero as Jurassic World arrives DOA at your local cinema this weekend. The first Jurassic film since 2001, this franchise...
View ArticlePolice Story: Lockdown
The original Police Story is one of the great action movies, a showcase for Jackie Chan’s multi-hyphenate talents that produced the purest expression of his Buster Keaton-does-action approach....
View ArticleOeuvre: Herzog’s Feature Films: The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser
Kaspar Hauser appeared in Nuremberg one day in 1828, unable to speak but for one sentence, clutching a handwritten note that was the only clue to his identity. The text of this note, written in broken...
View ArticleMe and Earl and the Dying Girl
Are we in a post Manic-Pixie-Dream-Girl age? Certainly, the trope and its name have entered the mainstream lexicon, and a number of films—(500) Days of Summer), Ruby Sparks, and The Pretty One to name...
View ArticleThe Fourth Noble Truth
Movies should begin with questions, not answers. The best ones present believable characters in imagined situations while leaving room for audience interpretation. The Fourth Noble Truth has good...
View ArticleMadame Bovary
It is difficult to fathom why a new film of Madame Bovary needed to be made now, in 2015, but it’s even harder to connect it to the woman behind the camera; though Sophie Barthes competently steers...
View ArticleRediscover: Sweetie
Kay (Karen Colston) is a woman so desperate for guidance in life (or perhaps so completely suggestible) that when her neighbor and part-time amateur tea leaf reader tells her that she is destined to be...
View ArticlePatch Town
Cabbage Patch dolls were once ubiquitous. I have no idea if they are still sold today, but for the demented among you, there now exists Patch Town, a dystopian musical styled like a Russian fairy tale...
View ArticleThe Wolfpack
The Wolfpack is a film shot largely within one fixed location, surveying the cramped, shabby Lower East Side apartment of the Angulos, a nine-member clan trapped within a rat maze of their own making....
View ArticleHoly Schnikes! Tommy Boy Turns 20!
Looking back, there’s something morbid about watching the opening scenes of Tommy Boy. After the hapless Tommy Callahan chugs beers and huffs down bong hits, he falls face first into a coffee table....
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