DARK PLACES is awash with dark moodiness as it tells a raggedy story that suffers from a failure of to find a narrative structure as strong or as compelling as the performance of his star, Charlize Theron. Based on the novel by Gillian Flynn, on whose novel of the same name GONE GIRL was based,… Read More »
A MOST VIOLENT YEAR Is A Most Excellent Film
A MOST VIOLENT YEAR begins, appropriately enough, with its protagonist, Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac) running. Though this is merely jogging through the snowy landscape of 1981 New York, he will spend the rest of the film running more purposefully either literally, figuratively, or both, as he scrambles to overcome fate and the fickleness of human… Read More »
MOON
Duncan Jones’ debut feature, MOON, is a sharp and intelligent consideration of reality itself. An engrossing tale set in the near future on the dark side of our planet’s satellite, it probes the equally dark side of the human condition and in the process does what the best science fiction ought to do, which is… Read More »
THE LINCOLN LAWYER
THE LINCOLN LAWYER is a smart, taut, and well-told neo-noir. The setting is Los Angeles, among the low-lifes and the well-to-do, where they meet and the consequences thereof. It follows the formula for such genre flicks, but has an impudent originality in the telling. The titular lawyer, Michael Haller (Matthew McConaughey) is a savvy practitioner… Read More »
THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN
What SNOW WHITE was to the advancement of hand-drawn animation into a genuine art form, so is THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN to animation derived from motion capture and generated from a computer. Visually, it is a thing of singular and striking beauty. Story-wise, it is just as sublime, presenting a thumping good tale of action… Read More »
SOLARIS
In a move as audacious as it is disastrous, Steve Soderbergh has decided to push the edges of what filmmaking can be and created in SOLARIS not so much a motion picture as a still life. One that is more sleep-inducing than a warm glass of milk and a bottle of Seconal. It is remarkable… Read More »
THE RAVEN
RAVEN is a mess of a movie. An infuriating mix of amateurish writing and flowery antique speech; of sublime romance and hopeless pedantry; of atmospheric melancholy and risible smugness; of pointless melodrama and a movingly poignant performance by John Cusack as the damned soul, Edgar Allen Poe. The premise is Poe’s mysterious last few days… Read More »
IDENTITY
I suspect that IDENTITY wants to be more profound than it ultimately is. This adds a note of prissy pretension to an otherwise effective little thriller. Set on a dark and stormy night at a rundown motel situated on an Indian graveyard, screenwriter Michael Cooney toys with horror conventions but doesnt succumb to the clichés.… Read More »
CONDFIDENCE
Like many great noirs, CONFIDENCE is told in flashback, narrated, as is also a convention of the genre, by a corpse. How he came to be lying in a gutter with several slugs in him makes for an intricately plotted little tale of crosses, double-crosses, and cons that you wont see coming. As you watching… Read More »
IN THE CUT
IN THE CUT is not just a bad film, it is a laughably bad film. This would-be erotic thriller wants to discomfit us by delving into the psychological underpinnings of sex and violence and yet succeeds only in making us feel sorry for the people who tried so hard and came up with bupkis. One… Read More »
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