Review

When we see the contrast between the values we share and the realities we live in, that is the fundamental foundation for social change.

If you have a shaky grasp of economics and want to better understand the growing problem of income inequality in the U.S., you probably can’t do much better than Inequality for All, an exhibition of the collected insights of former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich. Reich’s affable oratory and knack… See more →

I might have watched this sooner if I had known it was Zack Morris fan fiction.

Come on, Mundruczó, it can’t be that hard to get Baha Men on the phone these days.

1. I was not at all invested in any of the characters (nor did I find the villain even mildly intimidating), despite the fact that they were introduced over thirty years ago in one of my favorite movies. The great J.K. Simmons gives the only enjoyable performance, and it’s wasted on a throwaway character.
2. I usually roll my eyes a bit at nostalgic, anti-CGI Luddites, but this is one of those films that completely validates their… See more →

The offstage moments are flimsy. The onstage moments are unforgettable.

Setting out to portray a bunch of rich, white college athletes as victims, Fantastic Lies is acutely aware that, even with the facts firmly on its side, it has its work cut out for it. It takes great pains to demonstrate Duke University’s socioeconomic contrast with the community it abuts, and the fact that the school’s venerated lacrosse players are no angels. It acknowledges the epidemic of rape on college campuses, and is careful to… See more →

In Hush, Kate Siegel gives a truly terrific performance as an isolated deaf woman targeted by a psychopath. However, said psychopath is just about the least menacing home invader to grace the silver screen since Home Alone. If you really need to see a disabled person being terrorized, your time would be better spent with Wait Until Dark.

As with much of Kirby Dick’s work, The Hunting Ground isn’t necessarily a great documentary in the formal sense, but it is a powerful work of advocacy, equal parts devastating and inspiring.

Midnight Special is a road movie, and the bulk of its story takes place in the rear-view mirror. Who is this kid, and what are the extent and origin of his strange powers? Why are he and his family being relentlessly pursued by a religious cult and the FBI? Where are they going, and why? Amid the frenetic chase, Midnight Special selectively doles out backstory with patient precision, which makes it quite compelling early on,… See more →

On my second viewing of The Witch, I found a lot more to chew on, thanks in large part to the perspective afforded me by Katy Waldman’s analysis in Slate, especially this bit about the ending:

I can’t overstate just how shocking this moment feels, when you realize that the movie has up until now perpetrated a fundamental deception about its own point of view. All along, [director Robert] Eggers has stood on the Devil’s… See more →

As the counterpart to the devastating documentary The Act of Killing, which showcased death squad leaders gleefully dramatizing their unpunished roles in Indonesia’s 1960s genocide, The Look of Silence is less pronounced but more affecting. Focusing this time on the family of one of the estimated one million victims, it follows optometrist Adi Rukun as he calmly confronts his brother’s murderers, who are readily accessible and forthcoming with gory details. While the previous film tangled… See more →

Yuen Woo-ping is a great action choreographer. He is not a great director. Though Michelle Yeoh lends the proceedings gravity merely by showing up, this superfluous sequel is completely absent the poetry of the original.

Suggested alternate title: The Thankless Domesticity.

Props must be given to The Reckless Moment for being one of the rare films of its era to plainly acknowledge the raw deal women get in society. Of course, the film also reinforces said raw deal by billing its chain-smoking heart and soul, Joan Bennett, beneath James Mason, who gives a weak performance to a weaker character. Along with Bennett and the cacophonous existence written for her, Burnett Guffey’s… See more →

I walked into the theater with my skin practically peeled back in invitation, but The Witch just couldn’t quite get under it, and I’m not sure why. The film is exquisitely crafted, with thoughtful attention to period details, desaturated cinematography that is underlit to terrific effect, and a spare, dread-inducing score. The script is an often compelling examination of a deteriorating family, and how communal isolation intensifies the ill effects of religious fervor and gender… See more →

I... don’t know what I was expecting.

Exhaustive and exhausting, Electric Boogaloo’s overview of Cannon Films’ raucous history covers dozens of the production company’s provocative movies with blinding speed. Given that its subject at its peak averaged nearly one film produced per week, the pace is appropriate, and the clips and talking heads all whiz by so fast that reflection yields little more than an admittedly mesmerizing blur of explosions and boobs. Enough sunk in to convince me to revisit Cannon’s… See more →

Animated films aimed at broad audiences rarely take real advantage of the medium’s expressive potential, opting instead for one or another flavor of mannered representationalism. Boy & the World is a delightful exception, channeling the magical realism of a child’s naïve perspective to create a singularly vibrant, rhythmic aesthetic. Both a polemic and an affirmation, the film is occasionally heavy-handed with its politics, but not enough to undermine its core exploration of a generational spectrum… See more →

As successfully as any film I can recall, Carol captures the desperation that accompanies falling in love, and its fuzzy 16 mm rendering gives it the feel of a memory whose potency is undiminished by distance.

As I’ve mentioned before, I am wary of the seductive power of nostalgia. The original Star Wars trilogy loomed so large in my generation’s childhood that any meaningful attempt to revive it was going to be met with uncritical optimism. So as I cheered along with a packed theater on the opening night of The Force Awakens, I remembered that I had done much the same thing sixteen years earlier for The Phantom Menace, which,… See more →

On an emotional level, the aspect of Spotlight that had the biggest impact on me was its journalists’ team dynamic, and the team’s (mostly) unfailing trust in each other to do the job right, even in the middle of the highest-stakes investigation of their careers. In a discussion about the film, this was described with a colloquialism I hadn’t heard before, and which I found too perfect not to make a note of here: competence… See more →

At its best, Ghost in the Shell is a striking exercise in worldbuilding. If they were extended, I could probably watch an hour or two of its atmospheric montages of daily life in Hong Kong’s near future, whose sights and sounds are at once dreamlike and palpable. But as an exercise in storytelling, it’s disappointing that a film with such strong visuals and interesting ideas relies almost entirely on dialogue for its expository and thematic… See more →

It’s been a shitty week, but luckily @lowtheband came to town tonight to wash off the muck.

Violator: Chemical Assault

It wasn’t until my ears perked up for “Ordered to Thrash” (an instrumental) that I realized that Violator’s weak link is the vocals. Otherwise, this is a pretty fun time warp.

Courtney Barnett: Sometimes I Sit and Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit

I never expected to get so much enjoyment from something that reminds me of Sheryl Crow.

Life Sex & Death: The Silent Majority

I haven’t heard or thought much… See more →

As Mondays go, it turns out that the one where you get to see a free, surprise Stevie Wonder show is a winner.

1. How old is the youngest person alive who unironically uses the phrase “making love?”
2. How old is the youngest Richard alive who consents to being called Dick?
3. Is Rob Gordon velumiphobic?

As an indictment of our news media’s bloodlust and its complicity in racist fear mongering, the machinations of Nightcrawler’s Louis Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Nina Romina (Rene Russo) have the depth and subtlety of a Chick tract. Their unashamed “if it bleeds, it leads” philosophy is transparently arranged for maximum repugnance*, presumably with the intention of ironically using TV journalism’s own brand of reductive alarmism against it. But the staging of their discussions makes… See more →

The Damned is an odd crossbreed of outlaw biker film, love story, and atomic-age science fiction, and this unlikely amalgam allows the film to give equal time to several of the Western Bloc’s competing attitudes about the Cold War era.

In the idyllic seaside town of Weymouth, King (Oliver Reed) and his gang of delinquents, The Teddy Boys, spend their days terrorizing tourists. After becoming one of the gang’s victims, the affluent Simon (MacDonald Carey)… See more →

Color me impressed that @ChamberMonster managed to keep a secret for 2+ months, and tonight we’re seeing Stephin Merritt!

What a difference a shift in perspective makes. David Robert Mitchell’s directorial debut, The Myth of the American Sleepover, was a pensive coming-of-age drama that showed promise but was ultimately defeated by its own one-note sotto voce. With It Follows, Mitchell takes on the same themes much more successfully by funneling them through a simple but ingenious horror premise: the carrier of a sexually-transmitted curse is slowly but relentlessly pursued by a malevolent, shape-shifting being… See more →

The original Uncle Buck is still the best, but this is a really fun remake.

A lot of Assault on Precinct 13’s potential appeal rides on its antihero, Napoleon Wilson (Darwin Joston), but the character just doesn’t get there. All of his sardonic one-liners are limp punch lines in search of a joke, and Joston’s portrayal of him as a notorious, cavalier killer is bland and ineffectual, completely absent the menace he is presumed to possess.

A caricature of creativity.

The three things I find most interesting about Breakfast at Tiffany’s:

1. Made in 1961 at the tail end of the Production Code era, it is fascinating to see the film tiptoe around the fact that its two main characters are essentially prostitutes.
2. Even if one forgives its gobsmacking racism, I can’t begin to imagine how Mickey Rooney’s way-over-the-top slapstick could have been deemed fit for inclusion in this or any other film made for adults.
3. The… See more →

This superfluous sequel to The Trip is distinguished from its predecessor in two ways: 1) The titular road trip swaps northern England for Italy, and 2) Rob Brydon tries his hand at the mid-life crisis Steve Coogan had in the first film. Otherwise, The Trip to Italy is more of the same, and I do mean more. Remember all those celebrity impressions? They were funny, right? Here they are again, seemingly sans editing, driven far… See more →

My five favorite films of 2014, in alphabetical order.

Boyhood

Richard Linklater

In less skilled hands, Boyhood’s twelve years in production might not have amounted to much more than a (very ambitious) stunt, but instead, Richard Linklater’s landmark coming-of-age opus is accessible without being straightforward, and thoughtful without being ponderous. Its 165 minutes are breezy and unrushed, and yet it is over before you know it. I guess kids really do grow up fast.… See more →

There are many enjoyable moments in Inherent Vice’s drug-addled noir, most of them occurring between Joaquin Phoenix’s hippie P.I. and Josh Brolin’s crooked cop. As a whole, though, the stupor the audience is made to share with the protagonist renders the intricacies of the hardboiled plot largely impenetrable. That bewildering effect is fitting but unsatisfying.

Last month I described Birdman – unfavorably – as a “series of carefully scripted temper tantrums meant to embody the struggle of making capital ‘A’ Art.” I wouldn’t have guessed that a short time later, another film fitting that description would knock me on my ass.

Whiplash is a trenchant examination of greatness, approaching the idea not by deconstructing a success story, but instead by observing an integral moment in the life of someone who … See more →

Yowza, this thing stressed me the fuck out.

There’s not enough good stuff here to sustain an entire 75-minute special, but Chelsea generally keeps things moving at a good clip, so the lulls between the more satisfying laughs are never too long, and her style strikes a nice balance between sardonic and wacky, which elevates even her weakest jokes. The writing and directing tries to mess with the traditional standup form by adding lots of weird non-sequiturs – mostly quick, scripted cuts to… See more →

A technically adroit series of carefully scripted temper tantrums meant to embody the struggle of making capital “A” Art, Birdman pays lip service to the nuance that accompanies authenticity, but it tends to make its points as loudly as possible. This is probably about as good as overwrought showbiz navel gazing gets, and it’s still pretty off-putting.

Having cut his teeth producing Stuart Gordon’s celebrated H.P. Lovecraft adaptations, Brian Yuzna aims for the same audience with Society, his directorial debut. Its turbo-charged sex drive and comic body horror will be familiar to fans of Re-Animator and From Beyond, but unlike his work with Gordon, with Society Yuzna appears to have giddily assembled a special effects crew before he even hired screenwriters.

The plot, such as it is, follows a high school basketball… See more →

On the surface, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò seems like it requires some unpacking, at least for those of us without graduate degrees. Relocating the Marquis de Sade’s depraved novel The 120 Days of Sodom to Mussolini’s northern Italy in 1943, it name-drops Nietzsche, Proust, Ezra Pound, and others as it systematically humiliates and tortures a group of eighteen captive adolescents. But Salò’s goal is not opaque intellectualism for its own sake. Its poetic and… See more →

After reading up on Black Sabbath a bit, I wish I had sought out the original Italian version, rather than settling for the sanitized English version released by American International Pictures (which is the one currently available on Netflix in the States). Of the film’s three short stories, one (“The Telephone”) is edited severely enough to completely change its meaning, but thankfully, a discerning eye can still spot traces of its more lurid giallo origins… See more →

There’s not a single original moment in this vengeful ghost story, but the care it puts into presenting its collection of haunted house tropes makes it surprisingly enjoyable. Soaked in atmosphere, The Woman in Black’s familiarity doesn’t prevent it from being frequently chilling.

In The Mist, a few dozen townspeople are trapped in a Maine grocery store enveloped in a thick fog which is inhabited by mysterious, deadly creatures, and order dissolves at roughly the same rate as the hope of rescue. Conceptually, the film’s central interest in humanity as its own biggest enemy is intriguing (á la The Twilight Zone’s “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”), but its expression of that theme is somewhat ham-fisted. Marcia… See more →

Yuck: Glow and Behold

Well, at least we’ll always have that first album.

Def Leppard: Viva! Hysteria

Joe Elliott can’t hit the high notes quite as forcefully as he used to, but otherwise, Def Leppard sounds pretty fantastic here. It’s impressive to hear an album as quintessentially overproduced as Hysteria pulled off live this faithfully, and 25 years later at that. (Of course, the band has had plenty of recent practice aping its younger self… See more →

Fuck, you guys. White Lung.

Spent the evening catching up with @mrclean, @magnetbox, and @ems, followed by some rock and/or roll from those Dead Milkmen. Summertime!

In its assessment of how a small town in Alabama came to be a recording destination for discerning musicians and a hotbed of hit singles, Muscle Shoals spends a little too much time indulging New Age mysticism and Native American fables about the region’s supernatural gifts. Thankfully, it spends considerably more time peeling back the layers of Fame Studios founder Rick Hall, whose vision and prodigious talent as a producer is the unquestionable nucleus of… See more →

Slint was a short-lived indie rock band from Louisville, KY whose second and final album, Spiderland, is one of underground music’s most revered recordings. The album’s cryptic, distinctively uneasy aura, coupled with the group’s decision to disband without promoting it or touring, has granted Slint a rare mythic quality. Breadcrumb Trail, a documentary named after Spiderland’s opening track, somehow manages to be an informative and compelling account of the band’s story without really demystifying… See more →