Love the Coopers
Late in Love the Coopers, a dramatic chase sequence through a busy hospital ends with one character stating to another in grand fashion that “We’re too good for this story.” I chuckled out loud. Was...
View ArticleMan Up
Man Up offers nothing new to romantic comedies. But there’s just something about the onscreen duo of Simon Pegg and Lake Bell that makes it work. Despite the understandable backlash against the...
View ArticleThe 33
Like so many films of its ilk, Patricia Riggen’s lazily named The 33—a rote dramatization of the Chilean mining accident of 2010—glosses over the most interesting aspects of its story in favor of...
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Revisit: The Thin Blue Line
Seven years may have passed between Vernon, Florida (1981) and his next documentary, but Errol Morris didn’t let that time go to waste. Instead, he spent two and a half years investigating what would...
View ArticleIngrid Bergman: In Her Own Words
Celebrities are, by their nature, enigmatic. They smile for the camera, but everyone knows it’s another performance. Consequently, the celebrity “tell-all” or “true story” becomes a source of endless...
View ArticleDangerous Men
During a recent live movie riff event in Chicago, “Mystery Science Theater 3000”’s Frank “TV’s Frank” Conniff described famed b-movie director Ed Wood as a man who had “the soul of an artist,” while...
View ArticleJames White
Call it The Bro’s Progress. The generically titled indie drama James White observes a 20 something New Yorker (Christopher Abbott) who sleeps on his sick mother’s couch. As the movie starts, he’s not a...
View ArticleCriminally Underrated: Somewhere
Sofia Coppola movies are best watched late at night, in pensive moods, when words aren’t as important as the atmosphere that surrounds them. Instead of language, Coppola tells stories through images,...
View ArticleSecret in Their Eyes
How do you catch a killer? Why, you start by turning to a convenient photo of him staring longingly at the victim, of course. That’s the kind of gumshoeing we get in the A-list casted remake Secret in...
View ArticleOeuvre: Craven: The Serpent and the Rainbow
Wes Craven’s career lasted more than 40 years, but he was never easy to predict. His method of combining highbrow ideas—he explored metatexts and layered realities long before they became horror cinema...
View ArticleThe Hunger Games: Mockingjay- Part 2
Has splitting any book, especially one that is part of trilogy, into two different films actually worked out? The penultimate film in the Harry Potter series was easily the worst, and last year’s The...
View ArticleLegend
From Nicolas Cage in Adaptation to Eddie Murphy in Bowfinger, many actors have plied their skill in the challenging roles of identical twins—and when they succeed, as in both aforementioned cases, the...
View ArticleThe Summer of Sangaile
Sweetly titled, The Summer of Sangaile is a coming of age tale centered on a budding relationship between two young women. The mood is breezy and insouciant, perhaps more the stuff of spring. In the...
View ArticleRevisit: Strange Days
Long before she became an Academy darling, Kathryn Bigelow was Hollywood’s undisputed queen of the pulps. Bigelow brought a hyper-kinetic style and an unquenchable thirst for blood to big-budget genre...
View ArticleCarol
Certain experiences transcend language, and falling in love is one of them. It’s a descent into something unknown; a shared secret no one else understands. It is sweeping and intense and no film in...
View ArticleCreed
There is something comfortably quaint about the Rocky franchise. Despite diminishing returns in quality, even the inferior sequels have something that makes us want to cheer for their success. Even if...
View ArticleVictor Frankenstein
Max Landis’ script for Victor Frankenstein, Hollywood’s latest take on characters featured in Mary Shelley’s Gothic novel Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus, is a lot like the title character’s...
View ArticleThe Danish Girl
The best queer movies are the scrappy ones. Whether it’s Pink Flamingos, The Rocky Horror Show or Tangerine, they are lewd, surreal and lovably low-budget. The Danish Girl is none of those things. It’s...
View ArticleJanis: Little Girl Blue
Forty-five years after her death, Janis Joplin still doesn’t have a biopic of her meteoric rise to rock ‘n’ roll royalty. Part of the reason for this is that there are few actresses capable of...
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Revisit: Sullivan’s Travels
In Pulp’s dizzyingly classic song “Common People,” Jarvis Cocker tells the story of a rich Greek girl who comes to England to study sculpture and learn what life is like for people living on the other...
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