“Thirty years is a long time to wait for a sequel. If not for the passage of time, though, then George Miller’s career trajectory since 1985 may have initially been reason enough to regard the latest installment in the dystopian Mad Max series with caution. The new film stars Tom Hardy as Max Rockatansky with … Continue reading
“Try not to judge Thomas Vinterberg’s adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd as a product of Dogme. For one thing, that Dutch-born filmmaking movement (which Vinterberg co-founded with career bad-boy Lars von Trier in 1995) disbanded 10 years ago. For another, Vinterberg and von Trier built Dogme around strict rules, and we … Continue reading
“If you’ve been paying the slightest attention, you may have heard: Baltimore is on fire. If you’ve paid more attention than that, you might be aware that the United States of America has lately had a problem with police-involved shootings—though it doesn’t take a true scholar of our law enforcement’s history with racialized killings to … Continue reading
“Watching Russell Crowe’s directorial debut, The Water Diviner, there’s a sense that in another era the film might have been a vehicle for a Gary Cooper or Errol Flynn type. It’s a modern movie that’s decidedly old-school, unapologetically melodramatic and epic in both the scope of its story and the scale of its production—that the … Continue reading
“How long have we gone without Brooklyn Nine-Nine so much as hinting at the simmering romantic tension between Jake Peralta and Amy Santiago? In the grand scheme of things, only recently: the last time the subject of Jake courting Amy came up we were celebrating the joyous matrimony of “Boyle-Linetti Wedding,” an episode that categorically … Continue reading
“If a viewer can expect anything from a Quentin Dupieux film titled Reality, it’s willful surrealism. Reality and reality pass each other like two ships in the night, and one of those ships is an impish gallimaufry stitched together from bits and pieces of Magnolia, Holy Motors,Inception, Hitoshi Matsumoto’s oeuvre, and the vast canon of … Continue reading
“Well, well, well, The Comedians, we’re getting a little introspective, eh? This week’s ‘Celebrity Guest’ isn’t quite as funny as last week’s ‘The Red Carpet’, but it definitely has a lot to say about itself: Start with Denis O’Hare’s opening sentiment and end, chapter by chapter, with multiple guest appearances by the legendary Mel Brooks. … Continue reading
“About a half hour into Albert Maysles’ Iris, the late, great filmmaker takes his viewers on an open house through the gloriously untidy apartment of his subject, fashion maven Iris Apfel. She glides from place to place before sidling up to an unwieldy statue made in the image of a turkey. A Kermit the Frog … Continue reading
“And just like that, the 2015 Independent Film Festival Boston came to a close, not with a whimper, but with a big screen sick-lit adaptation made for the Sundance set. A lot more than that took place before IFFBoston’s closing night blowout, of course, but ending on Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s Me and Earl and the Dying … Continue reading
A Constant Visual Feast 