Something in the Air
Back in the chaotic times of the late ’60s and ’70s, student riots erupted throughout Paris, not unlike college campuses in America. Young idealists screaming for parity banded together to fight the government, angry cops and even angrier parents. For a pack of young communist comrades, school was over; it was time to start a revolution.... read more
The Iceman
Ariel Vromen’s The Iceman is inspired by real events in the life of Richard Kuklinski, a hitman convicted in 1988 for killing 100 men in the New York area during a 20-year period. While shocking, the murders are not the most surprising part of the story. Kuklinski perfected the art of compartmentalizing: His double life was so meticulously hidden that his wife and daughters had no idea about his real profession until his arrest.... read more
The Source
We are nation obsessed with pop culture. The Internet has become the great equalizer; there are websites, forums and groups devoted to every imaginable interest, philosophy and lifestyle. The term “counterculture” is charmingly obsolete. We are the assimilators and the assimilated. In America’s pre-connected recent history—the 1960s and 1970s—this was not the case. Young people by the tens of thousands took Timothy Leary’s admonition to heart: tune in, turn on, drop out. Hundreds of social experiments in communal living cropped up along the California coast. Some terrified us (think Manson Family), some mystified us (think Krishna Consciousness), and some exploited... read more
Love Is All You Need
After directing a series of intense dramas, including the Oscar-winning In a Better World, Susanne Bier turns her lens on a romantic comedy. While the setting (an Italian villa!), situation (a family wedding!) and soundtrack (“That’s Amore”!) of the blandly titled Love Is All You Need are clichéd staples of the genre, the Danish helmer and her frequent writing partner Anders Thomas Jensen bring both gravity and a light touch to an otherwise familiar narrative.... read more
Kiss Of the Damned
Vampires have always been associated with sex. From the sexual awakening of Lucy and Mina in Bram Stocker’s Dracula, to the homoeroticism in Interview with a Vampire, the genre has, in many ways, been more about the exploration of human desire than it has been about blood-sucking.... read more
Iron Man 3
Though Iron Man 3 is a better constructed film than its predecessor, ultimately it succeeds for the same reason the first two films did—Robert Downey Jr. is Tony Stark. read more
Post Tenebras Lux
Fading Away Only a dream Just a memory Without anywhere to stay -Neil Young Carlos Reygadas’ fourth film, Post Tenebras Lux begins with what, in retrospect, appear to be two dreams. They both become nightmares.... read more
42
The entire life of Jackie Robinson is a rich subject for a film adaptation, not that this would be obvious after viewing 42, Brian Helgeland’s fourth feature film. The youngest of five, Robinson was born into a family of sharecroppers in 1919. As a youth, he was a gang member (briefly), an accomplished track runner, football, tennis and baseball player, as well as a military man. (He was a member of the 761st “Black Panthers” Tank Battalion.) Robinson often spoke out against racism and suffered as a result. Long before Rosa Parks sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Robinson was courtmartialed... read more
Graceland
Take the worst day you’ve ever had at your job and multiply it by ten. That still probably won’t compare with the day that Marlon Villar (Arnold Reyes) is having in Graceland.... read more
Mud
Mud combines the poignance of a boy coming to terms with life’s realities with the excitement of top-notch suspense. read more
Kon-Tiki
If the mission depicted in Kon-Tiki had a motto, it’d be, “Here’s hoping this works.” Much of the film takes place on a primitive balsa-wood raft that’s meant to float 5,000 miles from Peru to the Polynesian islands. The vessel’s course relies on ocean currents to make the journey, and if anything goes wrong, six men will be stranded in the middle of the ocean.... read more
Upstream Color
If Shane Carruth’s time-traveling debut Primer was about outthinking what you might do in the future, his second movie, Upstream Color, is about deciphering why you feel the way you do right now. This is not by any means an easy question to answer, and Carruth measures the distance from our actions to our understanding with all the confusion and swirls of emotion that accompany our worst decisions. He does so in a way that taps into some of the best elements of the current American moviescape—the editing is crisp and pushes the story along at a clip, the performances... read more
The Big Wedding
Don’t be fooled by the marketing campaign for The Big Wedding. The pastel-hued poster may look as sweet as a wedding cake—it’s even tiered—but the screwball comedy from writer-director Justin Zackham (scribe on The Bucket List) contains unexpected layers of salty language, bitter political incorrectness and pungent sex that your mother may not be aware of when she deems it appropriate for her movie group. It’s not. Seriously, Robert De Niro goes down on Susan Sarandon in the very first scene.... read more
Filly Brown
Headlined by arresting newcomer Gina Rodriguez in her breakout role, Filly Brown aims to give voice to L.A. hip-hoppers spitting rhymes on Internet vodcasts and in underground clubs. The form is inherently authentic, articulating the performers’ life experiences in the language of the street. But it’s just as susceptible to bastardization as any other commodifiable art, especially when the artist is a hot young Latina who goes by the stage name of Filly Brown (Rodriguez).... read more
Andre Gregory: Before and After Dinner
In 2011 NBC promoted the “Critical Film Studies” episode of Community on the strength of its Pulp Fiction references. That particular episode of the pop-savvy sitcom indeed included plenty of shout-outs to Quentin Tarantino’s hugely influential crime flick, but “Critical Film Studies” reserved its deepest affection for a lesser-known movie, 1981’s My Dinner with Andre. In its quirky, soft-spoken way, My Dinner with Andre enjoys a cult following as ardent as Pulp Fiction’s, despite being about as opposite as two films can be.... read more
At Any Price
Working from a script co-written with Hallie Elizabeth Newton, Bahrani is more concerned with depicting a way of life than he is in telling a hearty or twisty tale. read more
Oblivion
Together, Cruise and Riseborough do as much work to anchor the film as the script allows, working especially hard in between the lines of dialogue. read more
The Angels’ Share
Winner of the Jury Prize at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, Ken Loach’s The Angels’ Share revisits the themes the prolific director first explored in 1969’s Kes and later in 2002’s Sweet Sixteen. With the number of unemployed young people reaching more than a million in Britain, here is a heist comedy set in the harsh reality of contemporary Glasgow, where youth who get off to a rough start see no way out and harbor no hope for the future. In an indirect indictment of a society that fails them, a small crew of petty criminals gets a fresh start... read more
It’s a Disaster
“Are you familiar with The Rapture?” “The band or the Blondie song?” This is the way the world ends in writer-director Todd Berger’s sophomore feature: Not with a bang but with a pop culture reference.... read more
Disconnect
It’s a well-known irony of the Information Age that while the Internet has allowed for unprecedented communication on a global scale, its seductively anonymous nature has also fostered a breakdown of communication on an interpersonal scale. This is the underlying theme of Henry Alex Rubin’s not-so-subtly named Disconnect, a dramatic triptych of loosely connected stories that mostly avoids the pitfalls of an easy target with solid work from all involved.... read more
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