Like the hackneyed runway model, 'The Neon Demon' is all external flash, little internal substance. For the most part. Aggravatingly vacuous but undeniably seductive, Nicholas Winding Refn’s hostile takedown of…
Viggo Mortensen is one of the greatest actors working today. Of that, I have no doubt. He stormed the screen as Aragorn in Peter Jackson’ epic Lord of the Rings trilogy, lead David Cronenberg’s outstanding crime thriller A History of Violence (which lead to a three-film collaboration between the two) and thinned down to a...
CONCLUSION: A Neptunian pathos piece showcasing masterfully slick animation and plenty of good humor, 'Finding Dory' still can’t escape the grasp of ancillary, auxiliary storytelling. And for all its trying,…
With Under the Shadow, Babak Anvari has his finger on the pulse of what we want, and deserve, from an independent horror movie. A potent location in 1980s missile-wary Tehran, a compelling lead in Narges Rashidi who grapples with cultural and professional oppression in addition to her family being haunted, and an actively restrained director...
Ned Crowley stresses “comedy” in his offbeat desert kill spree comedy of errors Middle Man. A darkly humorous dredge through despair and desperation, Crowley’s film emulates the dark comedy stylings that define greater desert noir the likes of No Country for Old Men with enough tics to call its own to warrant an existence. Parks...
Funny guy Craig Robinson strikes you as the kind of dude with a beefy laugh and a heart of gold. His appearances in film and television throughout the years were jump-started by his turn as ambitious warehouse manager Daryl Philbin in cult TV classic The Office which in turn resulted in a string of parts...
Improv is about following the germ of an idea until it’s reach its most preposterous conclusion and with emotionally honest and rib-tickling seriocomedy Don’t Think Twice, Mike Birbiglia has, like a great improv thread taken to its most radical extreme, tangentially bloomed into himself as a director. His comedy manifesto has always tilted at harvesting...
'The Conjuring 2 'understands the virtue of patience in a way that most studio horror films do not and the result is all the scarier for it. Building on the…
There’s no debating the value of Roger Ross William‘s accomplishment. In Life, Animated – a touching documentary centered on late-onset autism “victim” Owen Suskind and how he remarkably rediscovers language through animated Disney films – he has given voice to the voiceless (technical ingenuity had him pioneer a groundbreaking method to illicit confessionals from Owen)....
Paying lip service to fans foaming at the mouth and flipping the general public the bird, 'Warcraft' is a profoundly dumbfounding clusterf*ck of fantasy derivation and nerd-centered jabber-mouthing. Wowing in…