Near the beginning of THE CLUB, a shot rings out and the ramifications of that sound will echo throughout this quietly intense film about accepting guilt and attempting redemption. It happens shortly after a new resident arrives at a secluded house on the windswept Chilean coast where priests live cloistered an apart from the world… Read More »
THE WAVE (Bølgen)
A refreshing Nordic reserve permeates the action/adventure in Norway’s Oscar™ contender, THE WAVE. While most films vying for the foreign language award are of the small, intimate, and character-driven variety, THE WAVE pulls out all the stops with a disaster epic that is edge-of-your-seat suspenseful. Even the usual clichés to be found in the genre… Read More »
RAMS (Hrútar)
In northern Iceland where distractions are few, there is time enough to refine feuds to a fine art. And so it is with brothers Gummi (Sigurður Sigurjónsson) and Kiddi (Theodór Júlíusson), the metaphorical rams of RAMS, whose 40-year feud has been fueled by living side by side for all that time on the sheep ranch… Read More »
THE LADY IN THE VAN
Alan Bennett may be the Michel de Montaigne of our present age. Starting from the very personal, he composes perfect gems of reflection on the human condition as a whole. Where Montaigne was limited to the personal essay, Bennett essays several creative outlets, including memoir, theater and film, which brings us to THE LADY IN… Read More »
FLOWERS (Loreak)
A sweet melancholia pervades FLOWERS. The juxtaposition of life’s relentless move forward and the cryptic nature of human identity that confounds, delights, and charms work in tandem in this quietly powerful and unconventional love story. Moving on is the theme that ties the two tangential storylines together. In the first, Ane (Nagore Aranburu) learns that… Read More »
THE REVENANT
With THE REVENANT, Alejandro González Iñárritu has taken the true story of early 19th-century frontier scout Hugh Glass, and admirably manipulated it into a spiritual journey of savage poetry. Glass’s story, rendered cinematically in the 1970’s by Richard Harris in MAN IN THE WILDERNESS, becomes much more here. Iñárritu uses the bare bones of the… Read More »
QUEEN OF EARTH
When we first see Catherine (Elizabeth Moss), she appears to be melting. Mascara and eyeliner running down her face. Her hair dripping. She is reacting to a breakup. Badly. The camera clings to her distorted face as she reels from the news apparently just delivered by her boyfriend, James (Kentucker Audley) and is by turns… Read More »
CONCUSSION
By comparing the National Football League’s reaction to medical evidence linking repeated head trauma by its players to long-term brain damage and that of the tobacco industry’s reaction to medical evidence linking cancer and cigarette smoking, CONCUSSION cleverly makes its case. If it were just a case for corporate greed, that would be disturbing enough,… Read More »
DADDY’S HOME
After the magic of THE OTHER GUYS, a film that makes me laugh even at its most ridiculous, seeing co-stars Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg in DADDY’S HOME is particularly dispiriting. Once again, the former is a straight-laced, slightly priggish good guy, and the latter is the hot-headed epitome of cool thrown together due to… Read More »
THE HATEFUL EIGHT
THE HATEFUL EIGHT is an impudent, pugnacious comedy that uses the synthetic nature of its stylized homage idiom to be a whip-smart consideration of race, gender, politics, situational ethics, and very, very bad teeth. The genre is the western, but the tone is thoroughly modern as a group of the damned journey through the desolate… Read More »
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