There have been so many campus comedies pitting some manner of slobs against some manner of snobs that Justin Simien’s Dear White People gets ahead of the game almost instantly. Set at the fictional Ivy League school Winchester University, the film takes its title from a radio show hosted by Sam White (Tessa Thompson), who […]
Author: Jesse Hassenger
Are You Here
Matthew Weiner has written or co-written a dozen episodes of The Sopranos and dozens more of his own creation Mad Men, seven of which he also directed. These are the facts that will create expectations and puzzlement over Are You Here, in which those skills fail to translate to a feature film. It’s an odd […]
Land Ho!
Aaron Katz, director of mumblecore-ish twentysomething chronicles Quiet City (basically a less chatty Before Sunrise set in Brooklyn) and Cold Weather (basically Brick or Nancy Drew after washing out of grad school), has honed such a singular voice over a handful of films that I was surprised to see that he shares both writing and directing […]
Third Person
Winning Academy Awards for producing and writing Crash may have ultimately done more harm than good to Paul Haggis’s reputation. Just as well-respected movies like Shakespeare in Love and Ordinary People became “the movies that beat” seventies auteurs like Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese at an ultimately meaningless awards ceremony, Crash went from well-acted if […]
The Signal
The Signal begins, excitingly and promisingly, by pulling together odd little movie subgenres. It’s sort of a road movie, as Nic (Brenton Thwaites) and his best friend Jonah (Beau Knapp) ride along cross-country with Nic’s girlfriend Haley (Olivia Cooke), who is moving from MIT to the west coast; it’s also sort of a hacker thriller, […]
Palo Alto
Emma Roberts plays a high school senior in Palo Alto. Within the context of the movie, she’s convincing, containing multitudes: her April is insecure about her future, overlooked by her distracted mother, and both intrigued and frustrated by her classmate Teddy (Jack Kilmer). But by now Roberts has been playing a teenager for longer than […]
Veronica Mars
Veronica Mars, the movie, is not really a movie. It nonetheless has plenty of things that many actual movies selfishly neglect: it’s got a beginning, middle, and end; it showcases a wonderfully endearing cast of characters who often speak in snappy dialogue; it even has some thematic resonance about the way our past can take […]
Journey to the West
After a workhorse career in Chinese cinema throughout the nineties, comedian Stephen Chow broke through, to some extent, in the United States with the release of Shaolin Soccer and especially Kung Fu Hustle — projects he also wrote and directed, with his trademark mix of Jim Carrey-level cartoon energy and Quentin Tarantino-level cultural influences. In […]
Adult World
With most mainstream American movies remaining squeamish about sex, indies are supposed to pick up the slack with unafraid frankness. In the pitiable world of indie comedies, though, this often means addressing sex and porn with a kind of giggly smugness over mere flirtation with the subjects. Adult World, kinda-sorta about selling porn, isn’t as […]
Endless Love
I have not read Scott Spencer’s novel Endless Love, nor seen the 1981 film version starring Brooke Shields. From what I gather, the 2014 film based on the novel and/or any lingering affection for any movie that made any money in the eighties doesn’t have much to do with either of its predecessors. Endless Love […]
That Awkward Moment
That Awkward Moment is built on suggestions of real life, rather than depictions of it. Jason (Zac Efron), Daniel (Miles Teller), and Mikey (Michael B. Jordan) are suggestions of twentysomething men who hook up with suggestions of twentysomething women. Their New York City location is suggested by the characters’ smug bromides about what it’s like […]
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
In Ben Stiller’s Tropic Thunder, Jack Black plays a comic actor from a Nutty Professor-like franchise hoping to be taken seriously via his part in a movie about the Vietnam War. It would be easy enough to draw parallels, however sketchy, to Stiller himself, whose past Christmas season releases have included A Night at the […]
47 Ronin
47 Ronin takes place in a fantasy version of 18th-century Japan located, per the movie’s opening zoom, somewhere on the Universal Studios logo. The story comes from Japanese history that has grown into a national legend. Here it receives the ultimate tribute: conversion into a big-studio spectacular. There’s not a lot that’s impressive about 47 […]
Nebraska
Alexander Payne has become a master of a very specific, borderline nonexistent subgenre: the road movie that doesn’t move. About Schmidt centers on a road trip but spends plenty of time before and after the long drive. Sideways is about a journey through California wine country that hits a wall with unexpected affairs; even The […]
Runner Runner
The movie Rounders was not a big critical or commercial hit upon its release in 1998, but it has since grown into something of a cult classic, beloved by its fans for a stellar cast of character actors and its immersion into the world of backroom poker games. A spate of fifteenth-anniversary appreciation essays on […]
Bad Milo!
Few movies feel as strained as those that consider themselves cult classics in the making, drunk on the suspicion that a certain audience will embrace their self-conscious weirdness. Jacob Vaughan’s Bad Milo!, though, goes further, by which I mean not very far at all: this horror-comedy about a demonic creature who emerges from a man’s […]
Thanks for Sharing
Thanks for Sharing comes on like a strained joke from a recovery counselor — appropriate, as it contains plenty of those jokes, if they indeed qualify as jokes. The movie wants to treat the issue of sex addiction with accessible straight-talk and good humor, but this gladhanding just barely conceals the stern lecture about the […]
Enough Said
On its own, the premise of Nicole Holofcener’s Enough Said could fit snugly into a sitcom episode. Divorced masseuse Eva (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) goes to a party and meets both a potential new boyfriend, Albert (James Gandolfini), and a potential new client and friend, Marianne (Catherine Keener). Later, she realizes Albert and Marianne used to be […]
Stuck in Love
What is it about movies about writers that so easily rankles? The easy answer is that they’re a film critic’s bugaboo, claiming expertise in an area other writers like to think they know about. But the problem is just as often a mechanical one: movies about writers often feel compelled to produce samples of their […]
A Pretty Good Robot
To the extent that it makes any sense to pass off some critical notices and anecdotal reactions as a cultural consensus, Star Trek Into Darkness is, by most standards, a well-liked movie. It has a Tomatometer rating well above eighty percent. Its Metacritic score stands at a respectable 72. It will gross over $200 million […]