New York Film Festival Review: “Gone Girl” a Pitch Black Satire of Procedural...
If the eyes are the windows to the soul then Rosamund Pike is blessed with peepholes to the abyss, and David Fincher was wise to cast her in his latest prestige pulp. Speaking during a press conference...
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New York Film Festival Dispatch #2: “Saint Laurent”, “National Gallery” and...
Saint Laurent With their strained efforts to eschew the obvious, one could argue that biopics trafficking in jumbled chronologies are in danger of becoming as clichéd as the traditional linear...
View ArticleNew York Film Festival Review: “Inherent Vice”
What if Paul Thomas Anderson wasn’t the much-cherished heir apparent to American Cinema that many in certain circles wish him to be? What if the dude just wanted to get baked for two hours and imagine...
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New York Film Festival Dispatch #3: “Merchants of Doubt”, “Citizenfour” and...
Merchants of Doubt The new documentary from Food, Inc. director Robert Kenner presents a frustrating contradiction: it’s a film designed to take down corporate America’s slippery lobbyists and think...
View Article“Citizenfour”
One of 2014’s more compelling documentaries, Laura Poitras’ Citizenfour channels the measured cool of its subject—former National Security Agency analyst-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden—and eschews...
View Article“National Gallery”
Aside from Jean-Luc Godard, it’s hard to think of an octogenarian auteur who remains as vital and intellectually playful as 84-year-old documentary master Frederick Wiseman. Both are having banner...
View Article“Dumb and Dumber To”
Credit the Farrelly Brothers with this much: given Hollywood’s toxic insistence on character arcs, life lessons, and labored backstories, it’s kind of a relief to discover their signature morons...
View Article“Top Five”
It’s often said that comedy is the hardest thing for a performer, and it must be hard to be a comedian in the celebrity bubble of Hollywood. Sure, there’s the potential for big franchise paychecks and...
View Article“Big Eyes”
The anarchic id of late-20th-century Hollywood with a funhouse of singular films to prove it, Tim Burton hasn’t, alas, been regarded with much favor of late. Indifferent to the notion of growing up,...
View Article“Leviathan”
Leviathan, the pitch-black new film from Elena director Andrey Zvyagintsev, is bookended by montages of startling, almost cosmically withering imagery. Chilled to prehistoric temperature in the blues...
View Article“Mommy”
Xavier Dolan has a message for his detractors: “Eat my shorts.” Literally, it’s right there in the opening frame of the 25-year-old French-Canadian’s new film, Mommy: a close-up on a teenage boy’s...
View Article“Mortdecai”
There’s just never enough ham on the buffet for Johnny Depp these days. Unfathomable as it seems for anyone who grew up watching him in the ’90s—with his indelible performances in Cry-Baby, Ed Wood,...
View Article“My Name is Hmmm…”
As a lifelong lover of cinema and patron to the likes of Harmony Korine, Gaspar Noé, and Claire Denis, it’s surprising that 73-year-old Agnès Troublé, a.k.a acclaimed fashion designer agnès b, wasn’t...
View Article“Hard to Be a God”
A sickly child prince farts after nibbling on the exposed breast of a large bald woman. An intoxicated man gnaws on a leg of meat astride an ornate rocking horse. Nearby, another kicks a metal globe of...
View Article“’71”
From In the Name of the Father to Bloody Sunday to Hunger, there’s no shortage of films willing to engage the Troubles in Northern Ireland, but Yann Demange’s ’71 might be the closest the political...
View Article“Run All Night”
“I’m coming after you with everything I’ve got,” growls Irish godfather Ed Harris at his old buddy Liam Neeson, the two adversaries facing off over midnight coffee at a New York diner. “As long as...
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Lisandro Alonso On “Jauja,” Viggo Mortensen, and Narrative Mysteries
Jauja, the new film by Argentine director Lisandro Alonso, is a work of singular grace and mystery. Set against the deceptive beauty of 19th-century Patagonia and composnt: 2em;”ed in saturated,...
View Article“Jauja”
Mysteriously opaque and thrillingly spooky, Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja evokes what many films aspire to yet rarely achieve: a genuine lucid state of cinema-as-dream. Staking out terrain somewhere between...
View Article“Lost River”
Some movies arrive in body bags, crushed under the weight of toxic advance word to which too many critics, eager to join the consensus pile-on, gleefully align themselves. Since its catastrophic...
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“The Age of Adaline”
There’s an endearing scene midway through The Age of Adaline, the new time-hopping romantic drama starring Blake Lively, in which two lovers swoon in the back of a 1930s convertible at an abandoned...
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