A couple of years back, the brilliant Coen brothers unleashed A Serious Man on unsuspecting movie audiences. The masterpiece of faith and fate, the film featured a physics professor nebbish whose own growing Anti-Semitism is tempered by a cosmic design to make his life as unlivable as possible. Within the dark comedic core was a […]
Category: Review
Promised Land
Dealing with the hot button environmental issue of fracking (otherwise known as the hydraulic fracturing of the Earth’s bedrock in order to release trapped natural gas), and featuring a wealth of talent in front of and behind the scenes, Promised Land should be better. In fact, it should be great, especially when you consider the […]
Killing Them Softly
Andrew Dominik’s first film with Brad Pitt, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, was an unusually reflective movie about outlaws, a languorous and beautiful western by way of Terrence Malick. (Pitt would go on to star in the actual Malick film The Tree of Life, as if having graduated from an […]
The Impossible
I live in San Francisco, the earthquake capital of the U.S. Since 2004, no one much talks about earthquakes any more. Now, the big spectre of death is the tsunami, international fallout from the devastating waves that washed away coastal Thailand and killed over 200,000 people. We haven’t had a significant tsunami here since then […]
A Monster in Paris
By now, the family film genre has become a bit of a cinematic cliche. Either every effort is measured against Pixar’s presumed perfection, or cast off as commercial claptrap from studios which understand little beyond marketing and the elementary school zeitgeist. Walking somewhere in between both is the fun, flawed A Monster in Paris. Produced […]
Save the Date
In the aftermath of so many wedding-centric romantic comedies, an alternative vision of the subgenre seems to be building: first Kristen Wiig and Paul Feig’s Bridesmaids appeared with a messier, raunchier take on a best friend’s wedding, then Leslye Headland’s Bachelorette went even darker; even The Five-Year Engagement focused more on its central relationship than […]
Django Unchained
For a few years, it appeared as if Quentin Tarantino would retreat into a movie lover’s paradise and never emerge. I’m still recovering from the six-year gap between Jackie Brown and Kill Bill Volume One in the sense that a new Tarantino movie coming out “only” three and a half years after its predecessor, the […]
I Wish
No writer/director is better at mining big human truths from the seemingly trivial details of daily life than Hirokazu Kore-eda, whose jewel-box like movies — Nobody Knows and Still Walking are two stellar examples — offer intimate slices of life in contemporary Japan that teach us about life anytime and anywhere. In I Wish, Kore-eda […]
Stand Up Guys
It’s boring, hacky, pandering, maudlin, pleased with itself, and vacant of almost any believable human moment, but at least it’s also stupendously sexist. This could have been a good movie, that’s what kills me, and not just because it’s got good actors in it because, frankly, Pacino misses the mark by quite a lot in […]
John Dies at the End
It’s been a long time since we’ve heard from horror film director Don Coscarelli. When last he darkened a Cineplex with his dangerous visions, it was in service of the wonderful Elvis-as-ghostbuster classic Bubba Ho-Tep. Unfortunately, since then, his post-Phantasm career has been stalled. He’s tried to get a sequel, the vampire-inspired Bubba Nosferatu, off […]
Lincoln
It’s difficult to determine whether Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln plays as earnest historical drama or straight-up Oscar bait. The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle. Lincoln is the type of big-budget film that has “epic” written all over it, filled with an overabundance of speaking roles, period set design, and dramatic conflict — satisfying all […]