Me and Earl and the Dying Girl has a few nuances that are interesting and make it a welcomed newcomer to the dying teen genre, but still holds onto some worrisome tropes that keep it from rethinking the genre in a meaningful way.
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Newlywed couple Ted and Tami-Lynn want to have a baby, but in order to qualify to be a parent, Ted will have to prove he’s a person in a court of law.
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High schooler Greg, who spends most of his time making parodies of classic movies with his co-worker Earl, finds his outlook forever altered after befriending a classmate who has just been diagnosed with cancer.
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The Bridge is one of the best anti-war movies I’ve ever seen. Certainly its about the futility of war, but it goes farther than that.
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Spanish language beat-em-up Redeemer from director Ernesto Díaz Espinoza doesn’t quite make up in its action chops what it lacks in its screenplay.
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Sophie Barthes removes any focus on Charles in her retelling of Madame Bovary. In doing so she undermines many of the strengths of Gustav Flaubert’s novel.
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Chappie, out on Blu-ray now, may be a mess, but it has a strange kind of staying power, amidst all the madness.
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Red Army, out on Blu-ray now, runs parallel to the events that led to the fall of the Soviet Union and reiterates Communist ideals through the sport of hockey.
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Whether you are new to Brian Wilson’s story or you are looking for an excuse to pull out your Pet Sounds vinyl, Love & Mercy is a well-crafted ode to an inspirational figure, and an entertaining and well-acted film.
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BASE Jumping founder Carl Boenish was fearless, but Sunshine Superman makes the mistake of taking the emphasis away from Boenish’s exciting, envelope-pushing film work to tell a story that doesn’t celebrate his cinematic risk-taking or convey the excitement of his skydiving stunts.
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Currently playing at the Seattle International Film Festival, and riding high on the laurels won at Cannes and the Caesars (Adèle Haenel won Best Actress at both), Love at First Fight is a light, interesting, gorgeous, and ultimately successful take on the familiar rom-com standard.
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Showing at SIFF 2015 now, the doc License to Operate examines the volunteer organizations that have formed in L.A. in an effort to curb violence and create lasting lines of communications between the neighborhoods and civic officials (police included).
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From the beginning, Brad Peyton’s San Andreas is a compromised film. Many of the choices to force in exposition and emotional depth undermine the strengths of the disaster film.
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George Clooney and Britt Robertson journey to Tomorrowland, an incredibly flawed and unexpected misstep from writer/director Brad Bird.
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Currently playing at the Seattle International Film Festival, Personal Gold is a personal experience gilded in the minds of those who participated and filmed it. For anyone else watching, it’s an infomercial wrapped in a rote exercise in pedantic feel-good documentary filmmaking. This is like going to a baseball game that has a 20-minute time-share pitch before the first at-bat, and again between every half-inning.
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