Wes Anderson’s ASTEROID CITY presents us a dream within a dream as it ponders our place in the cosmos by setting its story in three separate realities that bump into each other the way subatomic particles swarm around an atomic nucleus. Is it synchronicity or chance or some other cosmic law of which humanity is… Read More »
MAGGIE MOORE(S)
MAGGIE MOORE(S) is a nifty neo-noir that deftly plumbs the seeping corruption underlying the dull quotidian of a small southwestern city, trading the usual stark contrast between light and shadow for an oppressive sort of omnipresent sunlight that shows everything but reveals nothing. Beginning with a murder in a seedy motel parking lot, it flashes… Read More »
COPSHOP
Click here for the flashback interview with Joe Carnahan and Frank Grillo for THE GREY. There has rarely been such an effusive, even whimsical, satire on violence as that which is found in Joe Carnahan’s COPSHOP. This blackest of black comedies adroitly combines tension and goofiness with an insouciance that is nothing short of breathtaking.… Read More »
A HOLOGRAM FOR THE KING
Tom Hanks once again reminds us that he is the quintessential American Everyman with a deeply affecting turn as the symbol of modern American enterprise in A HOLOGRAM FOR THE KING, based on the novel of the same name by Dave Eggers, and adapted by Tom Tykwer. Think of it as an updated version of… Read More »
HOLES
There is an attitude among some filmmakers that children’s films should be anything but sophisticated, rather, they should be simple in theme and execution and excruciating for anyone over the age of five. Not just the flicks for little kids, either, as evidenced by such recent mush as WHAT A GIRL WANTS. And for those… Read More »
Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris & LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE
Johnathan Dayton and Valerie Faris are partners is life (as in married) and in business (as in successful makers of commercials for umpteen years). Maybe it took such a combination to bring LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE to the screen without slighting either the family angle of the story, or the sly visual vocabulary used to portray… Read More »