SEE HOW THEY RUN is a handsomely mounted period piece with a clever premise undermined by an irksome dithering about its tone and a rampant directorial lethargy. Calling out tropes from cinema and literary mysteries with the sort of wild abandon from which the pacing would have profited, this uneven comedy takes us to 1953,… Read More »
LOVING VINCENT
The subjects of Vincent Van Gogh’s masterpieces come to startling, vivid, and enchanting life in LOVING VINCENT, a film of enormous beauty and sharp insight. Created by rotoscoping actors, and then painting each animation cell by hand in oils, the result is an immersive experience of how the artist saw the world while also questioning… Read More »
CITY OF EMBER
CITY OF EMBER is a triumph of art direction trumping everything else. Based on the novel by Jeanne Duprau, it is brimming with imagination, a pointedly political subtext, but not a whit of the wonder that should drive a tale such as this. The eponymous city contains the remnants of humanity, sent to the underground… Read More »
LOVELY BONES, THE
THE LOVELY BONES, based on the novel of the same name by Alice Sebold, is a somber tale told with vivid imagination about coping with death from both sides of the eternal divide. It’s very much a film of mood where emotions run deep and devastating, and those emotions are the most potent special effect… Read More »