One of the first visionary works of 2014 hits theaters today. A Field in England is Ben Wheatley’s psychedelic allegory about five men who search for a buried treasure.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Reviews
George Clooney returns to the director’s chair with The Monuments Men, a film that is less a stirring love letter to the Greatest Generation and a bygone era in film, and more a checklist, hastily written with a crayon. Based on the true story about a group of aging art history professors and architects that were tasked […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Out on DVD now, the independent horror movie Banshee Chapter is a weird amalgamation of a found-footage movie and a governmental conspiracy thriller.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
24 Exposures from Joe Swanberg feels like one of the contrived sex-driven thrillers from the 90s, replete with terrible acting, unexpected pants-on “sex” scenes, and a mystery that is so uninteresting that I challenge you to even remember it’s still there by the end of the film.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
It’s problems started with the novel, but Jason Reitman‘s adaptation of Labor Day is sheer wish fulfillment. It plays on the desire to be taken from our humdrum lives by a magical stranger, who solves our problems and makes us feel loved for the first time.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Raze is a cinematic throwback to the exploitation films of the 1960s and 70s. Unfortunately it doesn’t have the tongue in cheek humor or the thinly veiled fetishizing that made that era of film so interesting and endearing.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Unfortunately, it’s another in a long line of comedies that has guys behaving badly and treating girls like crap for the entire film and then lets them off the hook towards the end because that’s the structure of the typical romantic comedy — not because any of it makes any sense.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
This weekend the Screenland Armour is the home of Panic Fest, a horror and thriller film fest with vendors that acts as general celebration of everything creepy, crawly, and scary. It’s a great fest for people who like their horror a little more off the beaten path than the latest uninspired remake of whatever classic horror film Hollywood is butchering next.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
If the broad lowest-common denominator comedy Last Vegas is The Hangover of oldster party movies, then the indie feature Old Goats is that genre’s Best in Show.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Ralph Fiennes‘ second feature as director, The Invisible Woman, is a gauzy and beautiful period piece, but the film’s lack of a specific cinematic perspective leaves it wanting.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Filmed in the docudrama style that has become Paul Greengrass’s trademark, ‘Captain Phillips’ is out now in a Blu-ray/DVD/Ultraviolet Combo Pack.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
One year before the death of Martin Luther King Jr., with the civil rights movement in full swing and the black power movement on the way, Hollywood produced a movie that used the classic Hollywood narrative style that people were used to, but in the service of a story they weren’t used to seeing.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
As long as the subsequent films in the franchise avoid turning Ryan into a superhero and keep their plots at least somewhat rooted in reality, the Jack Ryan franchise may stand a fighting chance. At least they finally have the right actor.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
‘Sunrise’ is a reminder of how quickly film language developed into something so remarkable in under 20 years and how few modern filmmakers today take advantage of the innovative concepts that Murnau and his fellow silent-film pioneers perfected.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Experienced completely through the eyes of an 11-year-old boy named Bud, Terence Davies’ 1992 film The Long Day Closes is a deeply personal impressionistic triumph, out in a dual-format Blu-ray and DVD from The Criterion Collection.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }