THE TAKING OF TIGER MOUNTAIN has blood, guts, and sentiment. Based on actual events, and on the novel by Bo Qu, it’s a sweeping epic of a war film set in northwest China just after World War II has ended, when the government has collapse into corruption, bandits are terrorizing the villages, and the People’s… Read More »
THE CREEPING GARDEN
THE CREEPING GARDEN is a documentary that successfully challenges everything we thought we knew about life on earth. The result is both fascinating and discomfiting, not unlike its subject, the slime mold, a life form that confounds all attempts to classify it as animal, vegetable, or fungal. It moves from place to place on its… Read More »
AS ABOVE SO BELOW
Whatever else AS ABOVE SO BELOW has to recommend it, and it has several things that eminently do so, it has breathed a little fresh air into the found footage genre of horror film. This is a tidy little horror film heavy on mood, light on gore, and bursting with a refreshing originality of story… Read More »
TANGERINES (Mandariinid)
There are films that tear you limb from limb with their shrill bombast and flagrant moralizing, and then there are films like TANGERINES, that quietly break your heart with the folly of humankind. This year’s Oscar™ nominee for best foreign language film from Estonia is an anti-war statement of the first order, and one that… Read More »
SONG OF THE SEA is Beautiful Harmony
SONG OF THE SEA reminds us of the power of simplicity in storytelling and in animation. Hand-drawn and steeped in Irish folklore, it is a profoundly moving experience rife with charm, wisdom, and beauty. Told from a child’s perspective, the magical and the mundane coalesce in perfect harmony, revealing the one in the other in… Read More »
Going Beyond BLACK OR WHITE
Mike Binder has a particular genius for showing people brimming with good intentions, but flawed, stumbling through life without the operating instructions that would help them negotiate the bumps along the way. He has the gift of showing humor and pathos as elements that are not so much disparate, as entwined, manifesting at oddest moments… Read More »
Julianne Moore is STILL ALICE
It starts with a slip so small, so subtle, that it goes unremarked by everyone present. At the birthday celebration for Alice Howland (Julianne Moore), her rejoinder to a question about the sibling rivalry between her two daughters concerns her relationship with her own sister, now deceased. It is a moment that evokes what is… 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 »
TOP FIVE = Top Flight
TOP FIVE starts a little out of chronological sequence with two protagonists walking down a Manhattan sidewalk discussing art and life. Specifically art versus life with one opining that a movie is just a movie while the other disagrees. The man, as we will shortly learn, is Andre Allen (Chris Rock), superstar funnyman and recovering… Read More »
THE HOBBIT: THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES
And so it is our last visit to Middle Earth, and a bittersweet one it is. Peter Jackson’s finale to his pair of trilogies is a triumph of spectacle and humanity, notwithstanding that the human beings of the piece are not the main characters. It’s only flaw, and that is a relative one, is that… Read More »
- 1
- 2
- 3
- …
- 6
- Next Page »