WANDER DARKLY is the antidote to the generic rom-com. Set in the subjective viewpoint of a woman who is convinced that she is dead, it explores a relationship gone wrong using the unencumbered honesty of retrospection. The woman is Adrienne (Sienna Miller), who is always quick to point out that the father of her infant,… Read More »
7500
7500, the code used for hijackings, takes the all-too-familiar tropes of a terrorist hijacking and reframes them with a harrowing story that unfolds in real time. By removing any hint of sensationalism from the events, filmmaker Patrick Vollrath focuses on the moment-to-moment uncertainty of people ripped in an instant from the security of their familiar… Read More »
LUCE
LUCE is less a film than a political dialectic on race and class in these United States, and a brilliant, exquisitely performed one at that. Told with a deliberate, sometimes maddening ambiguity, it challenges the audience at every turn about where the truth lies, and the limits of familial loyalty. By the end, not every… Read More »
MAZE
There is a distinct strain of melancholy nihilism throughout Stephen Burke’s MAZE. Based on the 1983 prison break by 38 inmates of the eponymous maximum security prison in Norther Ireland, it mixes the suspense of plotting an escape dependant upon split-second timing from an inescapable prison with the psychological games the prisoners play with the… Read More »
HUNTER KILLER
The best thing I can say about HUNTER KILLER is that is it forgettable. This putative thriller of geopolitics and military bonding blows things up, sinks submarines, parachutes stoic guys through a thunderstorm, and fires endless automatic weapons, but when it’s all over, not much sticks beyond a nicely timed wrench catch, and the fortuitous… Read More »
BAD TIMES AT THE EL ROYALE
Drew Goddard crafts tales that are multi-layered and philosophically challenging. From his days in the Whedon-verse to the deliciously exercise in meta-text, CABIN IN THE WOODS, there is always much more going on than the surface narrative. And so it is with BAD TIMES AT THE EL ROYALE, which may not be the flawless wonder… Read More »
TWENTY TWENTY-FOUR
You could, if so inclined, sit back and enjoy Richard Mundy’s counterintuitively dynamic film, TWENTY TWENTY- FOUR, merely as an engrossing study of a loner going slowly mad in isolation. As the difference between reality and madness builds to a fever pitch, the mystery of what exactly is happening in Roy’s underground bunker matches the… 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 »
DENIAL
DENIAL is a lean, literate, and emotionally devastating film. It’s based on the true story of Emory history professor Deborah E. Lipstadt’s (Rachel Weisz) legal battle in the British courts to prove that the Holocaust had actually taken place and was not, as asserted by Holocaust deniers, a construct invented by world Jewry as part… Read More »
BLAIR WITCH
Once again college kids with video cameras march into the dark piney woods in search of something better left undisturbed. Unlike previous attempts to capture the lightning in a bottle that was the original BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, attempts that went down in flames, writer Simon Barrett and director Adam Wingard have taken the found-footage format… Read More »
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