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
To The Wonder
Since his nearly two-decade-long hiatus in between the release of Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line, filmmaker Terrence Malick has become, by his standards, almost prolific. The problem is, he seems to be sinking into a similar pattern as of late, making beautiful, ethereal, purely cinematic features that rely a bit too much on what have now become his signature filmic techniques. From The Thin Red Line on, up to and including his most recent feature, To The Wonder, Malick’s go-to device has been to set dreamy, lushly shot sequences to esoterically poetic voiceover narration. For his previous... read more
Detour
A little more than halfway through William Dickerson’s Detour, the film’s protagonist, trapped in his truck deep underground, takes a moment to ponder and appreciate a tiny ant that has crawled into his vehicle (and potential tomb). The ant bites him. So much for kinship amongst the tiny and powerless. The metaphor is both obvious and apt—before the immensity of Nature, best-laid plans and self-centric lives are absurdly inconsequential. Ignore this disparity at your own peril. (But don’t be afraid to put up a fight, anyway.)... read more
Simon Killer
Breakups are never easy, especially when you’re a borderline sociopath. Thank goodness, you can get away from it all and work out your feelings in Paris as the borderline sociopath Simon does in Simon Killer.... read more
The Company You Keep
Assembling a cast of Hollywood heavyweights can mean many things. It can signify the devil-may-care attitude of an Ocean’s Eleven, where acting luminaries are given quirky, “different” roles so they can have some fun away from their relentless Oscar baiting. It can, quite literally, be stunt casting, such as something like The Expendables, where the gluttony of violence and bloodshed also extends to the role call on posters. In the case of Robert Redford’s newest effort, The Company You Keep, it is a shot across the bow of the serious adult drama, declaring the director/star’s intent to burn the... read more
No Place on Earth
In 1993, American cave enthusiast Chris Nicola traveled to Western Ukraine for two purposes—to learn more about his ancestral roots and to explore the Gypsum Giant cave system that is home to some of the world’s largest horizontal caverns. When Nicola stumbled onto some miscellaneous artifacts—a key, a comb, a woman’s shoe—he also stumbled onto a much shrouded and forgotten piece of World War II history. In No Place on Earth, director Janet Tobias explores this profound discovery, shedding light on a incredible story of endurance.... read more
The Brass Teapot
What does a bachelor’s degree in art history get you in today’s economy? A hundred thousand dollars worth of debt and a dismal, soul-crushing day job. That is, unless you’re lucky enough to stumble upon a magic teapot.... read more
Evil Dead
Overall, this latest iteration of possessed youth behaving badly seems a much more humorless affair than the original, but to an extent that’s unavoidable. read more
Blancanieves
As enjoyable as it was before, powered by the Weinstein awards machine, it started barreling toward the Oscars, The Artist was a little obvious, wasn’t it? A black-and-white silent movie about … a black-and-white silent movie star? The greater challenge is to make a black-and-white silent that isn’t meta but is still relevant in the 21st century. Pablo Berger’s exquisite Blancanieves is that film.... read more
Hemingway & Gellhorn
For any filmmaker, dramatizing the life and times of a well-known and highly documented individual frequently stands as a no-win situation. Change too much and people will question your ethics as a storyteller. Change nothing are you are left with the alienating chaos of real life.... read more
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