Film Review: Young & Beautiful - François Ozon
Attempting to subvert the voyeuristic gaze and cautionary coming-of-age moralizing, the film is an unconventionally compelling if conflicted seasonal portrait.FrançoisOzon's intriguing, perplexing...
View ArticleFilm Review: Jealousy - Philippe Garrel
This uniquely concise take on family and memory focuses on the strained relations between Parisian couples.The prelude to Philippe Garrel's two-part familial film-play Jealousy [La Jalousie] is a...
View ArticleFilm Review: Nightcrawler - Dan Gilroy
The film's sardonic extremity makes an impression but also restrains it from achieving a more resonant commentary and investigation on modern news.Dan Gilroy's directorial debut Nightcrawler offers up...
View ArticleFilm Review: Tale of the Princess Kaguya - Isao Takahata
Celebrating and condemning the arbitrary customs of nobility, the film's exuberant watercolor animation overwhelms its uneven mythological interpretation.Rooted in Japan's oldest extant folktale from...
View ArticleFilm Review: Inherent Vice - Paul Thomas Anderson
Dismissing some of the tangential psychedelia from Pynchon's anti-noir novel, P.T. Anderson transmutes a comparably sprawling version to the screen with a few of his own memorable revisions, including...
View ArticleFilm Review: Leviathan - Andrey Zvyagintsev
Both biblical and modern in scope, Zvyagintsev's epic film indicts the corrupt intertwined power structures of the Russian Orthodox Church and State with pointed finality.The monumentally lumbering...
View ArticleFilm Review: The Duke of Burgundy - Peter Strickland
Like a lost chapter of seductive '70s cinema, the elliptical all-female fantasy uniquely and entrancingly explores BDSM through lepidoptery.Peter Strickland's latest sensuous nightmare, The Duke of...
View ArticleFilm Review: Love and Mercy - Bill Pohlad
At its best, the nonlinear film lures its audiences into a dreamlike rhythm that synchronizes with Brian Wilson's soulfully innovative approach to music.The reverberating medley of melodies at the...
View ArticleFilm Review: Spring - Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead
Aspiring to reach Linklater's signature emotional earnestness, this genre amalgamation of romance, science fiction, and black comedy fails to reconcile its disparate tones.The unassuming title of...
View ArticleFilm Review: Violet - Bas Devos
Inexorably led by sensation rather than lucid story structure, this ambiguous coming-of-age study marries the longs takes of BélaTarr with subject matter oft-sought by Gus Van Sant.Bas Devos'...
View ArticleFilm Review: Respire - Mélanie Laurent
The alternately sensitive and blistering coming-of-age thriller's tumultuous core relationship ultimately collapses into a climax of cold contrivance.Actress-turned-director Mélanie Laurent takes a...
View ArticleFilm Review: Cemetery of Splendour - Apichatpong Weerasethakul
A culmination of the drolly understated poetic surrealism that brought the director international acclaim, the film's warm humanity and densely suggestive imagery collectively influence and deconstruct...
View ArticleFilm Review: Anomalisa - Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson
An underwhelming narrative entangled in the mild humor of hackneyed mid-life crisis, the stop-motion film proves Kaufman's gifts are more suited to immense theatrical sandbox than domestic and office...
View ArticleFilm Review: Knight of Cups - Terrence Malick
In the latest film in Malick's late-career period of prolificacy, the director turns his attention to Hollywood.At one point in Knight of Cups, the newest feature in Terrence Malick's period of...
View ArticleFilm Review: The Forbidden Room - Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson
While slightly overlong, this surreal montage film synthesizes a broad range of silent and sound artifacts in rapturous, volcanic eruptions of pure cinematic curio.The end-result that iconoclastic...
View ArticleFilm Review: Right Now, Wrong Then - Hong Sang-soo
This self-reflexive parallel timeline variation on the meet-cute offers invigoratingly light and accessible consideration of gender perspectives and human adaptiveness.Hong Sang-soo's latest cinematic...
View ArticleFilm Review: The Neon Demon - Nicolas Winding Refn
Refn's morbidly satirical exposé of the fashion industry and competitive world of modeling is more cinematographically inspired but substantively underwhelming kitsch.Nicolas Winding Refn's latest...
View ArticleFilm Review: Some Beasts - Cameron Bruce Nelson
The Appalachian drama of a romantic couple weathering physical separation tenderly renders poetic truths about diverging paths in life and the meaning of family.Regional and spiritual authenticity of...
View ArticleFilm Review: The Club - Pablo Larraín
This inquisitive, unnerving chamber drama, which culls from the sexual abuse scandal within the Catholic Church, is dulled by conflicting messages of forgiveness and vengeance as well as the...
View ArticleFilm Review: Certain Women - Kelly Reichardt
The film perceptively elevates Meloy's Montana-based short stories in examination of serendipitous intersections that progressively delve deeper into the details of four working women's lives.In its...
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