All told, Ode to Joy is a darn good time, making the most out of a wild premise without ever veering too far off into mockery or slapstick.
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Warren Cantrell
‘Sword of Trust’ is a fun, funny, and touching trifle with well-painted characters and a surprising amount of insight into modern myth-making
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A slow-burn postmodern western-noir thriller with just a tad more style than substance, Into the Ashes delivers when it needs to.
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A movie about listless, uninspired, confused man-children & the throngs of women tying themselves in knots over them, ‘Summer Night’ is a decided miss.
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‘Plus One’ effectively uses the tropes of the rom-com genre to conform to the best parts of it while blazing a path entirely its own.
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A breezy little documentary with modest ambitions and a surplus of reverence for its subject, ‘Loopers: The Caddie’s Long Walk’ makes par.
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[Rating: Minor Rock Fist Down] A straightforward hagiography piece that celebrates its subject with little critical analysis, Botero is an instructive albeit unambitious documentary. Tracking the creative growth of Columbian painter/sculptor Fernando Botero, the film hits all of the expected notes of the artist’s professional maturation using testimonials from family members, curators, art historians, and […]
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[Rating: Minor Rock Fist Down] A rom-com that lives in the periphery of the world it creates for itself, Photograph endeavors (yet too often fails) to tell a familiar story without the traditional narrative building blocks of its genre. This is somewhat ironic, too, for the story is steeped in the traditions of its characters, […]
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Using a refreshing, unique spin on a classic high school yarn, ‘Banana Split’ succeeds in crafting a story that’s both entertaining and empowering.
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Bolstered by an against-type performance by Hawke, and a quiet but strong turn by Rapace, ‘Stockholm’ might just suck you in like the syndrome.
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‘William’ struggles to overcome its clunky dialogue and try-hard script to ascend to anything more than a basic retread of better, more ambitious fare.
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‘Division 19’ is The Hunger Games meets The Truman Show, with just a hint of V for Vendetta, yet bad. Really, really bad.
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‘Dragged Across Concrete,’ like Mel Gibson’s casting in it, works better in theory than in practice if a person thinks about it for more than a minute.
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‘Finding Steve McQueen’ is an interesting (albeit uneven) trifle, pairing true crime hijinks with meaningful introspection and character work.
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[Rating: Solid Rock Fist Up] A sober exploration of family, tradition, honor, greed, and colonialism, Birds of Passage (showing now at the Tivoli) slices through expectations to present a film that is laser-focused on a specific time, people, and place. Tracking the birth of the modern drug trade in Columbia during the second half of […]
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