Well, hey, look at that, a new Gareth Evans movie. I’ve been waiting on more Evans since 2014’s The Raid 2: Berandal, a high point in action filmmaking (if a little bit bloated, but the bloat is all good bloat); he has a way about the camera that ensures the camera is as involved in what … Continue reading
Upfront: I dug Kate Plays Christine, documentary filmmaker Robert Greene’s last movie, but I am floored, still, by Bisbee ’17, his latest, and I saw it over two weeks ago. Maybe that makes me…I don’t know, simple? I think Kate Plays Christine hangs around the edges of fast comprehension. It’s elusive. I like an elusive film, and I’m … Continue reading
Minor note about The Old Man & the Gun: As of now, David Lowery is 2 for 4 with me, having won me over with Pete’s Dragon and lost me on both Ain’t Them Bodies Saints and A Ghost Story*. The Old Man & the Gun reads like a snow globe, a capsule containing every sort of movie Lowery grew … Continue reading
So imagine this: There’s a house, and it’s littered with clocks, but there’s also a clock in its walls and it’s the clock in the walls that everyone’s fussing about. Doesn’t make a ton of real world sense, but it makes plenty of movie world sense, and presto, there you have it, Eli Roth’s The House … Continue reading
Nothing clever here: Just a blunt-ass takedown of a really, really bad movie. I’m not sure if Lizzie thinks it’s higher class than it is, or…wait, yes I am. It’s a Lizzie Borden biopic that skimps way the hell out on murder, saving the best known part of the Borden legend until somewhere close to the … Continue reading
Cool story: I somehow wrote my entire review of Michael Matthews’ Five Fingers for Marseilles not realizing that, when I copied the HTML code to paste the title as needed throughout the piece, I managed to cut off the “s” at the end. Oh well! I’d pester my editor about it, but truth to tell, I’m … Continue reading
I run hot and cold on Danny McBride, in the sense that I run hot and cold on Danny McBride projects. If you wish to contain his brand of gregarious psychopathy, you have to build the right kind of cage for him, otherwise you end up with a Danny McBride performance without a structure to … Continue reading
My rating system has needed work for a good long while; too often I feel like I’m giving films too high a score, and thus giving them a pass on their flaws, when I’m much more mixed on them than the numbers imply. So basically, take my low-ish score on What Keeps You Alive with … Continue reading
Hello! I’m back from vacation. Vacation is why I’m behind on sharing and posting my work. Don’t look at me like that. I’m entitled to go on vacation. Deal with it. Anyways: Here’s Andrei Rublev. There’s a new restoration of Andrei Rublev running in New York City, at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, courtesy of Janus Films. … Continue reading
Add The Night is Short, Walk On Girl to the canon of “great drinking movies.” The characters here drink more liquor than any mortal human could possibly imbibe without dying, much less without blacking out; they also have better adventures than most of us do when under the influence, though most of us don’t do the … Continue reading
Rachel Dretzin probably didn’t make Far From the Tree anticipating that members of her audience might come back around to Donald Trump mocking a disabled reporter at a campaign rally in 2015 (nice voting, schmucks!). Speaking for myself, that’s exactly what I kept thinking of watching the film (which is based on Andrew Solomon’s non-fiction novel … Continue reading
Welp, A24 isn’t really doing much to promote Augustine Frizzell’s excellent Never Goin’ Back, so I guess it’s up to me, a critic, to champion this gross, tender, raunchy, outrageous, sweet-hearted, and absolutely hilarious film. (It’s one of my favorites of the year. And one of the best I saw at this year’s Independent Film Festival … Continue reading
If you thought The First Murder was good, and if you liked The Second Murder, too, wait until you get a load of The Third Murder! Okay: Sorry. I’ve already made this joke on Twitter. It wasn’t funny then (lies! It was hilarious), and it isn’t funny now (see last parenthetical, asshole). But I couldn’t help myself. Talking about … Continue reading
“Hey,” says the movie, “let’s all go back in time to our adolescence, when our skin resembled pizza bathed in grease and battered with a meat hammer, and everything we liked actually in retrospect really, really sucks, and social interaction felt as risky as giving yourself a half dozen paper cuts and sticking your limbs … Continue reading
Fourth verse, same as the first, a little bit better, but it couldn’t be worse. Okay, okay. Fine. I’ll stop ragging on The Purge, the first movie in the Purge franchise, and start praising The First Purge, the fourth movie in the Purge franchise, even though The First Purge lags behind The Purge: Anarchy and The Purge: Election Year. Parts of The First Purge … Continue reading
I’m in a semi-depressive funk on my birthday, so I’m going to force my way through by thinking of The Year of Spectacular Men, a delightful gem of a film where the Deutch family – Madelyn, Zoey, and Lea* – assemble like the Avengers and make us cackle at rom-com done well. 2018 is Zoey’s year: … Continue reading
For clarity’s sake, all of the things I say about Brett Haley in the intro to my review of his latest, Hearts Beat Loud, is absolutely true: I’ve never spoken to him one on one, but I have seen him speak, twice, two years in a row, at Independent Film Festival Boston, where in both appearances he … Continue reading
Days after my review of Bart Layton’s American Animals published at Paste Magazine, I’m starting to wonder if I had problems with the film based on what I thought it should be rather than what it actually is. Yeah, yeah: Sounds like a bunch of hand-wringing movie critic anxiety over nothing. American Animals tells the story of four … Continue reading
