Film Reviews, Interviews and Articles
When high school student Annie heads to a new school, she finds herself surrounded by hostile faces. And needle-in-the-haystack Jules. The two attractive outsiders immediately strike up a kinship and a secret flame broils, leading them down forbidden passageways of mutual lust and peddled cajolery. Read More
There’s a moment in Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some where four collegiate athletes hover around an overstuffed bong, listening to the psychedelic crackle of Led Zeppelin, competing to see who can take the biggest bong rip. It’s an indisputably Linklater moment, one that speaks to the essence of the Austin filmmaker’s disco baseball comedy that forces one to meditate on what friendship and camaraderie meant before the advent of cell phones. There is an enviable sense of authentic connection found in this communal stoned passage, one that finds itself increasingly diluted by distraction in modern day conversation, that’s undercut by an overarching spirit of competition. Community and competition – two forces that rally to make Linklater’s latest film a low key, nostalgiacore home run. Read More
10 Cloverfield Lane is predicated on a beautifully simple catch 22: I am trapped in a room with psychopath but if I leave said room, I will most certainly die. The only safe solace in a decimated post-apocalyptic world, a bunker shared with a dangerous captor named Howard (a never-better, totally Oscar-worthy John Goodman), is indeed no safe solace at all. To hostage Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), this post-op lion’s den houses clearly seems to house a hulking threat; a man who percolates with such clear-eyed ferocity, unwavering mania and steadfast paranoia that the probably poisonous air outside seems an amenable option. But then again, what if he’s not a psychopath after all? Read More
Terrence Malick’s latest game of twiddle sticks cinema peppers the landscape of celebrity ennui with vacuous narrative threads and listless visual poetry. A meandering, overlong death march towards nothingness, the latest from the American auteur is a showcase of a man who’s more than worn out his welcome, who has drip-dried every ounce of juice from the same re-wrung fruit but still yet splashed it up on the screen like a car wreck. Anyone familiar with Malick’s filmography knows to expect little more of Knight of Cups than Christian Bale wandering the corridors of celebrity mansions, beautiful beach fronts and abandoned, dilapidated buildings while whispered trite reveries titter on in the background, theoretically contributing to a greater sense of purpose (that is just not there). In that regard, Malick has played to his devout audience bullheadedly, ignoring any and all critiques of his last critical flounder, To The Wonder, pursuing his own self-parodying style to pertinacious rigidity. Read More
When discussing 2015 and its ilk of Oscar wannabes, most rallied around a similar sentiment: what an odd and unpredictable year for awards. At one point or another, as many as five of the eight Best Picture nominees (The Big Short, Bridge of Spies, Brooklyn, Mad Max: Fury Road, The Martian, Room, Spotlight, The Revenant) could have been considered the front-runner with the vast majority of the race seemingly coming down to a Big Short vs. Spotlight showdown. Huge box office tolls and unprecedented last minute momentum moved The Revenant into the pole position at an opportune time, seemingly hucking Spotlight from the, ahem, spotlight. And right when it needed it most. These tectonic shifts have made pining down the Best Picture winner a particularly challenging game this year with an unlikely chronology of match-ups apparently leaving the battle to be waged between Adam McKay‘s financial meltdown dramedy and Alejandro González Iñárritu‘s survivorman epic. That being said, one shouldn’t discount Tom McCarthy‘s Spotlight which could just pull a last minute KO. Now if only George Miller‘s supreme Mad Max: Fury Road had the same surprise comeback potential… Read More
In 1988, Eddie “The Eagle” Edwards attended the Winter Olympics as the sole representative of the Great Britain ski jumping team. Facing active discouragement from his nation’s Olympic committee, Edwards was forced to self-fund the journey that led him to the Calgary-held Olympics, mounting his campaign on sheer determination and grit rather than skill or, you know, practice. His name became synonymous with perseverance, his bumbling visage a representation of that sportsman mantra of being the best that you can be. Read More
There’s so many tattered sleeves of other (greater) crime films sifting in and out of John Hillcoat’s Triple 9 that the final product plays a bit like a voodoo pincushion of greatest hits moments. There’s buttons of Heat, The Departed, American Gangster and many other crime classics, with characters seemingly beamed in from Bad Lieutenant, Sicario and End of Watch, all come to rumble in Hillcoat’s dirty little Atlanta playground. That this stable of influences is mostly able to coalesce into a largely exciting, ceaselessly dark and somewhat intelligible thriller is admirable, even if it sometimes finds itself a touch off the rails. Read More
What do 1630, a silver cup, Christian fervor and a goat named Black Phillip have in common? The Witch. Unholy goodness through and through, Robert Egger‘s feature film debut is a horror masquerading as a costume drama that’s as beady, black and misshapen as the center of a goat’s eye. Beneath the dirt-stained, leather-bound waistcoats, the perfumed, toity language of the New World, the white bonnets and constrictive girdles, The Witch has a vicious, illicit and suspicious center and though admittedly scaled back on “scares” is deeply atmospheric, deeply disturbing and deeply great. Read More
Ben Stiller‘s approach to round two of the Zoo is akin to chucking a baby bird from the nest to see if it will fly or plummet, only to discover a 25-pound lead weight secured to said birdling’s ankle bits. No scene demonstrates this better than when Hansel (Owen Wilson), in an attempt to elicit Derek’s (Stiller) magical modeling stopping power, is throwing objects at the now-out-of-fashion Derek Zoolander. Failing to summon the “fire” that stopped Mutagatu’s (Will Ferrell) M-shaped throwing star and saved the Malaysian Prime Minister all those years back, each progressively larger prop strikes Zoolander’s duck-face curtly in the sucker. By object four or five, a tasty-looking bottle of Reposado that acts as an accidental stand-in for the cockeyed audience, Zoolander cries out, “This just isn’t working.” No Ben Stiller, it really, really isn’t. Read More
Deadpool has been lurking around the primordial soup of supers since his debut print appearance in February of 1991. Striking a nerve with comic fans fancying some bite with their bark and some rabies to their Cujos, Deadpool arrived on the scene a supervillian before slipping into the moral grays of anti-hero-dom and donning those infamously R-rated wisecracks into his persona like a latex-tight getup. By the time he was leading his own franchise, a cultly rabid surrounded the merc with a mouth like bush flies buzzing around fresh-squeezed dookie. When transported to tinsel town in 2009’s much derided X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Deadpool found himself properly trounced; literally nutless, drained of personality and wit, with mouth rendered useless. The character was as effectively brain-dead as the project he found himself housed within. The tongue-tied, tatted-up war boy that was Deadpool circa 2009 was quickly relegated to the bin of supers who couldn’t withstand the transition to the silver screen and even the suits at Fox did all they could to forget this whole X-Men Origins thing ever happened in the first place. Read More