MEAN DREAMS begins with a snake and ends with an apple. In between it is less bible story than a stark noir set in the bucolic autumnal countryside where Jonas (Josh Wiggins) and Casey (Sophie Nélisse), two emotionally damaged teenagers, meet and become each other’s unlikely salvation. Each is the child of fathers that are,… Read More »
THE 9TH LIFE OF LOUIS DRAX
THE 9TH LIFE OF LOUIS DRAX uses the perspective of a child to tell a very mature, very troubling story. It’s a device that could be precious if handled with less sensitivity, less intelligence than is found in Max Minghella’s wondrous adaptation, directed by Alexandre Aja, of Liz Johnson’s novel of the same name. It… Read More »
LEN AND COMPANY
The eponymous Len, of LEN AND COMPANY is Len Black (Rhys Ifans), a successful record producer and towering failure of a human being, who has absented himself from the world in order the ponder the detritus of his life. He longs for silence, or at least no music of any kind in his rustic upstate… Read More »
PAPA: HEMINGWAY IN CUBA
The greatest virtue of PAPA: HEMINGWAY IN CUBA is that it was filmed in Cuba just after it was re-opened to the United States. It still looks the way it did over 50 years ago, when the story is set, which not too long before the United States embargo, protesting Castro’s revolution, went into place.… Read More »
THE WITCH
The true horror in THE WITCH does not lie in its supernatural underpinnings. Rather this dour psychological thriller plumbs the depths of madness that human nature invites upon itself with a closed mind and a conviction of righteousness. Set in a New World colony in the early 17th century, it is an incisive deconstruction of… Read More »
DEADPOOL
Exhibiting a hearty dose of irony and a mordant sense of humor, DEADPOOL exuberantly embraces the conventions of the super-hero genre while fearlessly pricking the more pretentious conventions of same. There is in this tale of a man who has super powers, but refuses to be a hero, evinces a bold and bracing willingness to… Read More »
REGRESSION
Alejandro Amenábar directed Nicole Kidman to one of her best performances in THE OTHERS, a horror film that was both haunting and clever. The full review of that fine film is here, and I recommend watching that instead of REGRESSION, a film that is equally atmospheric, but diffused in its mounting terror, rather than sharply… Read More »
EVERY THING WILL BE FINE
Tragedy is complicated. Guilt and anger, acceptance and forgiveness don’t fall into neat pigeonholes in Wim Wender’s EVERY THING WILL BE FINE, a title that is what everyone aspires to in this small but powerful tale of searching for redemption. The central character is Tomas (James Franco), a good writer with a middling career and… Read More »
THE FORBIDDEN ROOM
To see a Guy Maddin film is to have the disconcerting experience of having the horrors of the commonplace revealed. With the most delicate shifting of perspective, and by only a few metaphorical millimeters, hitherto unsuspected absurdities are made manifest, resulting in a comedy to give you nightmares, and nightmares to make you howl with… Read More »
ROOM
ROOM is a profound meditation on the human condition, a meditation as bittersweet as life itself, and as uplifting as a child’s innocence. Based on the novel by Emma Donoghue, it confronts the barbaric simplicity of captivity, by contrasting it with the confusing complexity of freedom. What should be easy is not. Happiness is elusive.… Read More »
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