Film Reviews, Interviews and Articles
Cooties is Children of the Corn by way of Daddy Day Care. A tactless, haphazardly unfunny, totally DOA clunker, horror-comedy Cooties is the brainchild of “that guy” Leigh Whannell (of the Insidious and Saw franchises) and a severely handicapped brainchild it is. Read More
“Time passes – that’s for sure” – an Eileen Myles quote that opens the film Grandma and could have just as easily come spilling from the churlish mouth of Lily Tomlin’s titular character. After all, Tomlin’s Elle Reid is no stranger to her own passing time. In her words, “I’m rapidly approaching 50” (Elle’s deadpan is matched only by her sense of irony – Tomlin has around rounded her third quarter-century.) Her thick sheen of sarcasm is persistently cutting and deeply riotous and between the sharp writing and Tomlin’s pitch-perfect comic timing, there’s many good reasons to see Grandma. Forget that Tomlin’s name will be thrown all up and down the Oscar buzz aisle because award or no, her presence here is absolutely aces. Read More
Chess players be mad crazy. This is the conceit of Edward Zwick’s latest film, Pawn Sacrifice. Telling the tale of Bobby Fischer‘s rise to the title of Chess World Champion, Zwick washes away the taste of Bobby Fischer the puny, prodigal chessmaster like with a mind-erasing swill of Everclear, replacing it with Bobby Fischer, megalomaniac, paranoid, delusional, dedicated anti-Semite. His competition, Boris Spassky, does not fare much better. These dudes ‘r’ nuts. Read More
Black Mass is a stage upon which Johnny Depp has revived his career, and little more. As the film’s malevolent heavy and famed criminal overlord “Whitey” Bulger, Deep is borderline excellent, brooding and prowling around the screen like a silverback gorilla. On the streets, he’s equally guerrilla, taking down his enemies as well as former-confidantes-turned-rat in maelstroms of cold-shelled slugs. And though Deeps is admirable as the callous and cold Jimmy Bulger, the film itself overwhelmingly replicates its star’s unenviable personality traits in its cinematic aura, resulting in a film that’s even more callous and cold than the iconic gangster at its center. Read More
Human beings simply aren’t built to function at the cruising altitude of a 747. At 29,000 feet, you body is literally dying. Lack of oxygen becomes a toxic, poisoning the brain and forcing your body to shut down non-vital organs. At such heights, it’s near impossible to breathe without a tank of O. Beholding Everest on a proper IMAX screen, I too found myself gasping for air. It’s literally breathtaking. Read More
Like The Raid redefined modern martial arts movie, Hardcore seeks to redefine what a POV action movie can be. Russian director Ilya Naishuller, who earned internet stardom for his band’s, Biting Elbow, music video “Bad Motherfucker” (which attracted almost 30 million Youtube views), sought out to make a full-length feature in the same style and with the help of a successful Indiegogo campaign has just unleashed Hardcore unto (mostly) cheering TIFF audiences. Read More
Primary Peruvian exports include non-monetary gold powder, cooper ores, concentrates, cathodes and non-crude oil. You can now add to the list supremely compelling cinema as Magallanes, the product of first-time Peruvian director Salvador del Solar, is a true festival stunner. Soaked in a gleeful amount of real world suspense and intensified by rich dramatic character work from its apt principal cast, the slow-but-steady-building drama-thriller is a certifiable symphony of hard-won victories – both from a narrative and practical standpoint. Read More
Synopsis: “In the late 1980s and early ‘90s Brooklyn, New York was the murder capital of America and ground zero for the crack cocaine epidemic. One man, Michael Dowd, led his crew on a rampage through the streets of East New York, robbing dope dealers at gunpoint, burglarizing homes and becoming involved in the biggest drug ring the city had seen. That man, and his cronies, were all police officers. Labeled “The Dirtiest Cop Ever,” Dowd turned his department’s 75th precinct into a hotbed of corruption, both protecting and robbing drug dealers while lining his own pockets to the pointing of busting with cash and drugs. His arrest in 1992 led to the largest police corruption scandal in NYC history.” Read More
If you wiggle a pencil fast enough, it appears soft. Rubbery. Made of flesh. It’s only when you reach out and touch the pencil that you realize it’s made of hard wood. In a film, we cannot reach out, we cannot exert force or physical contact, so we rely on cues that the filmmaker plants within the picture; clues that help us distinguish the realm of the real from that of the imaginary. Der Nachtmahr (The Nightmare) is an exercise in distinguishing the real from the imagined through the lens of what is essentially ET’s aborted fetus. Read More
Lesyle Headland couldn’t give a lumpy shit what bad things you have to say about female directors and she won’t stop herself from telling you so. The verbose talent provided some nasty good times when we sat down to discuss her latest film, the truly hysterical Sleeping With Other People [review here]. Leslye proved not only the most crass interview we’ve sat down to but also one of the most candid. We talk being a female director in a male world (with lion and lioness allegories), the film’s infamous bottle scene, her favorite scene that she cut from the film, casting Jason Sudeikis and Alison Brie, crying on set, the misnomer of improvisation, the shift from Bachelorette , movie references and what you would find in her VHS Blu-Ray player. Read More