“Big Game’s stelliform cast isn’t the only proof Finnish director Jalmari Helander has gone Hollywood. The scene that best evinces his Tinseltown transition plays out in the film’s first few minutes, in which one of the supporting players from Helander’s international breakout movie, the wonderful Yuletide-horror gem Rare Exports, gets mercilessly exploded in a wanton … Continue reading
“Asking whether we really needed a sequel to 2012’s Ted is almost unfair to Ted 2. Sequels, follow-ups, and part twos (and threes and fours) make up an ever-increasing percentage of our moviegoing diet these days. Questioning their necessity has nearly become reflexive. Treat it like a Mad Lib if you like. (Did we really … Continue reading
“On August 15th, 1982, as the festivities of Chicago’s annual Bud Billiken Day Parade petered out and the city grew quiet under a blanket of seasonal heat, teenagers Marilyn Green and Jerry Hillard were gunned down near a Washington Park swimming pool. Testimony from six eyewitnesses put the spotlight of suspicion on Anthony Porter, whom … Continue reading
“Pixar’s Inside Out feels like a miracle for two reasons: deprivation and reclamation. Last year marked the first since 2005 that the studio failed to bless pop culture with new material. Leading up to that gap in their slate, though, Pixar’s status as an animation giant started a perilous downward spiral thanks to a surge … Continue reading
“Trust is a valuable commodity online. Though the connective power of the Internet has made our world smaller, believing in what you can’t see is risky business. That gal, or guy, you meet in World of Warcraft could actually be a guy, or gal, who regularly falls asleep covered in Cheetos debris. The sweet Groupon … Continue reading
“Patrick Brice wants to make you squirm. Two features into his career as a filmmaker, Brice has made a found footage performance piece-cum-Craigslist nightmare (Creep), and a raunchy adult sex comedy bolstered by a healthy dollop of dangling male prostheses (The Overnight). Put bluntly, he’s out to test the limitations of his audience. But that’s … Continue reading
The speed and immediacy of access we all enjoy courtesy of the Internet tends to breed knee-jerk thoughtlessness. As a result, we live in a non-complex world where a single strike against an established entity in the entertainment industry – a movie, a television show, a celebrity – is enough to declare it substantially bankrupt. Years … Continue reading
“Making new friends isn’t easy when you’re grown-up and married. It’s that kind of anxiety first felt by the leads in Patrick Brice’s sophomore feature, The Overnight, a dizzying, debauched, excruciatingly funny film about knitting new connections through discomfort. Brice has made the trend-forward sprawl of suburban Los Angeles his backdrop, and his story begins … Continue reading
“Ever walked away from a film feeling completely discombobulated by your viewing experience? We all enjoy linear movies, but every now and again we’re taken off guard by a completely ambiguous, inscrutable flick that leaves us scratching our heads. A little obscurity once in a while is a good thing, of course – dense, cerebral … Continue reading
“Who doesn’t like a good movie monster? Whether it’s Count Orlok from Nosferatu or the Rhedosaurus from The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, cinema has a monster flick out there to suit your tastes. Maybe you’re a fan of Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion skeletons, or perhaps the granddaddy of all kaiju, Godzilla. But there are movie monsters, … Continue reading
“If you’ve ever strolled down a bustling metropolitan city sidewalk, you’ve probably caught glimpses of homelessness in the corner of your eye. Maybe you’ve noticed sleeping bags nestled in doorways and highway underpasses; heard panhandlers beseeching passersby for change; walked swiftly past long queues outside of overcrowded shelters. Rather than discretely observe these folks while … Continue reading
“Since premiering in April, The Comedians has leaned on the generational gap separating its two stars for drama and mostly left their differences explicitly unspoken. A few episodes, like “Billy’s Birthday,” address the divide while remaining non-specific; it’s an age disparity rather than a personal one, seen in a brief moment where Billy crashes … Continue reading
“There’s an art to manipulating a moviegoing audience. Every movie practices this art. Filmmakers have to sculpt their viewers’ responses to their work, even if only to a limited extent; some do it less than others, or perhaps they do such a good job exploiting our emotions that we don’t notice it. Those films function … Continue reading
“Jurassic World marks the fourth entry in its paleontological franchise, but it’s probably more important as the second chapter in the story of Chris Pratt’s unexpected ascent to movie stardom. Pratt, seemingly born to make a career out of playing lovable doofuses, made his goofy tenor work for him in last year’sGuardians of the Galaxy. … Continue reading
“Like all projects based around the lives of actual human beings, the Dylan Thomas biopic Set Fire the Stars has to contend with the problem of dramatizing reality. “This happened,” the biopic tells us, but savvy viewers know that even the best biopics tend to dress up the truth. It’s refreshing, then, to see a … Continue reading
“When one door closes, another opens. In Eddie Mullins’ Doomsdays, that second door is actually a window through which his protagonists, Dirty Fred (Justin Rice) and Bruho (Leo Fitzpatrick), make a hasty egress. They’re vagabonds living off the grid by choice, breaking and entering into empty vacation homes in the Catskills in search of sustenance … Continue reading
“New England winters don’t mess around—they cut right through you. Once the temperature drops and the trees shed their leaves, your best bet is to hibernate like a local: Stick to the indoors, preferably curled up next to a well-tended hearth (even more preferably clutching a mug of hot buttered rum). But in Ted Geoghegan’s … Continue reading
“Years go by, decades end, cultures change, and yet no matter the place and time, human beings constantly dream up new, horrible ways to kill one another. In the late 1600s, Sweden gave us the howitzer. In 1836, Samuel Colt invented the revolver and ushered in the retirement of the sword. In 1952, the United … Continue reading
A Constant Visual Feast 