A MONSTER CALLS begins, fittingly enough, with a child’s nightmare. We don’t have the context yet, but the primal fear gripping the boy clinging to the hand of a woman hanging over an abyss neatly sums up the emotional journey to come. The boy is Connor (Lewis MacDougall), and the woman, as we will shortly… Read More »
LIVE BY NIGHT
LIVE BY NIGHT is so sumptuously photographed that it can almost make up for its shortcomings. Based on the novel of the same name by Dennis Lehane, it has weathered its translation by becoming a slight story heinously overblown. It also suffers from too many false endings. So many, in fact, that I can’t vouch… Read More »
SILENCE
Academics are taught to write with a dispassionate yet highly detailed style for their scholarly treatises. That is the approach that Martin Scorsese has taken with SILENCE, his philosophically dense and immaculately rendered film of Shusaku Endo’s book of the same name. The result is a maddening film more to be admired than enjoyed as… Read More »
PATERSON
PATERSON is the quintessence of everything Jim Jarmusch has done before. Playful in approach, deeply philosophical in meaning, it is a lyrical evocation of joy and sorrow as lived by a bus driver/poet during one eventful yet ordinary week in his life. The bus driver (Adam Driver), his route, and the city in which he lives… Read More »
PASSENGERS
PASSENGERS is a long, increasingly preposterous slog whose most tantalizing element is the question of why Jennifer Lawrence looks so very much like a young Renee Zellweger in some shots. Has there always been such a striking resemblance, or is it that this film is so tedious and predictable that one has the time to… Read More »
WHY HIM?
Long before he was mild-mannered chemistry teacher turned fearsome drug lord on Breaking Bad, Bryan Cranston made his mark in television comedy by, among other things, keeping Malcolm in the middle, and tending to Seinfeld’s teeth. Those comedic chops stand him in good stead for WHY HIM?, an intermittently hilarious hybrid of the buddy film… Read More »
ASSASSIN’S CREED
I am not familiar with the video game on which ASSASSIN’S CREED is based, so I cannot speak to whether or not this cinematic translation has captured its essence. I can speak, however, to the befuddling bifurcation of said translation. Part straight-up action film, part would-be contemplation of the pros and cons of free will,… Read More »
ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY
Leave us pass over in silence, for now, the more irksome plot devices in ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY. Instead, let us focus on what a fine action/adventure film it is. This prequel to EPISODE IV: A NEW HOPE takes a line from that film and builds an impressive feature-length story about the Star… Read More »
ALLIED
There is an artistic license that we allow films that sweep us along when their emotional resonance is overpowering. Minor plot points that aren’t resolved, or factual errors. For an example of the latter, one need look no further than the Letters of Transit, desired by so many in CASABLANCA. No such thing. Yet it… Read More »
GOLDEN KINGDOM
Brian Perkins’ debut feature, GOLDEN KINGDOM, is a profoundly lyrical film about life, death, and spirituality. Set in a small rural Buddhist monastery in Myanmar, it’s the story of Ko Yin Witazara (Shine Htet Zaw), a boy monk who is put in charge of his three fellow boy monks when their abbot is called away… Read More »
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