There is a creative exuberance to Valérie Donzelli’s Declaration of War that stands in beautifully paradoxical contrast to the smothering sorrow of its subject matter. Donzelli and Jérémie Elkaïm play a French couple with classically familiar names, Juliette and Roméo. … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2012 — Number Seven
There were plenty of my upstart opinions flung around digitally this week at Spectrum Culture. Among the film reviews, there was my take on a new indie thriller, the sort of neo-noir that had a momentary spell of prominence in the mid-nineties. That’s not to imply that this new effort was outdated. Instead, it’s major sin was its unrelenting dullness. I’ve been sitting on a fair number of albums from late 2012 while still picking up new releases to review, and that stockpiling led to a pair of pieces this past week. I reviewed the second full-length from the Joy … Continue reading Spectrum Check
I hedged a bit when I first wrote about Magic Mike, noting that the final act had problems. I stand by that, but as time has passed, I find I care less and less about where the movie sags and more about its thrilling thrust. Inspired in part by star Channing Tatum’s own experience as a male stripper, the film makes this hedonistic world appear both unbearably sleazy and wickedly intoxicating, often in the same gasped breath. In that way, it races along the same track as Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights, but Anderson’s vivid sprawl is replaced by director … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2012 — Number Eight
#49 — Don’t Look Back (D.A. Pennebaker, 1967) When Bob Dylan toured England in 1965, he had five officially released albums to his credit, including the just-issued Bringing It All Back Home. He was a star, but not yet an … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 60s — Number Forty-Nine
21 Jump Street (Phil Lord and Chris Miller, 2012). This adaptation of the ludicrous nineteen-eighties television series about cops undercover in high school (one of the first hits for the Fox network) was met with surprising appreciation by the critical community when it was released last spring. I can certainly understand why its metafictional comedy may have been a welcome surprise, but it’s still more ragged and predictable than it is shrewd and effective. Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum have nice interplay as the requisite mismatched cops working together, and there’s something refreshing about the inversion of stereotypes, with the … Continue reading Carax, Davies, Godard, Huston, Lord and Miller
With Your Sister’s Sister, writer-director Lynn Shelton positions herself as an auteur of particularly tricky terrain. She structures her scripts as if they’re challenges to herself, writing the story into tight corners and seeing if she can plausibly extricate the … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2012 — Number Nine
I had a busy week over at Spectrum Culture. I usually lead off this recap with the pieces I wrote for the film section, but given yesterday’s One for Friday post in this space spring directly from the new music review I wrote, it seems more appropriate to begin there. I often pick up releases from the bands that endure from my college radio days since I figure I have a little more authority in writing about them. That rarely results in getting the chance to celebrate a genuinely great records, but that’s exactly the pleasure I had with the … Continue reading Spectrum Check
As if Daniel Day-Lewis didn’t already deserve countless plaudits for his transformative performance as the sixteenth President of the United States in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, it seems his reluctance to take on the role–noting that reluctance to take on a … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2012 — Number Ten
I’ve been thinking back on the film year just passed, looking for some sort of unifying theme or idea. As I’ve noted before, I don’t really believe in the sort of cinematic groupthink that other critics are stumbling upon all the time when they survey the wide array of multiplex and art house offerings (much as I like and admire the film writers for The New York Times, they seem to stumble upon a wholly imagined trend about every other week). But I do think the films that speak to any given individual can be somewhat revelatory, offering a glimpse … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2012 — An Introduction
Remarkably, it’s taken Kathryn Bigelow all of two films to transform from an also-ran action director to the most revered and dependable cinematic chronicler of American’s early 21st century of global militaristic angst. Unless there are people out there who … Continue reading It was a girl with her face in the shadows so dark
