A little more than twenty years ago, Whit Stillman and Jane Austen were hot on the filmmaking circuit at the same time. The former was the writer-director behind a pair of very well-regarded and somewhat atypical indie house hits, both … Continue reading Now Playing: Love & Friendship
Thanks to a rigorous strategy of willful media blindness (which is mightily difficult for me to pull off in the midst of my almost compulsive consumption of the entertainment news and reviews blipping across the internet), I sat down to … Continue reading Now Playing: The Lobster
I think a case can be made that Captain America: Civil War is mistitled. The skirmish promised there is duly presented, with the crummy crossover comic book series with which it shares its name thankfully providing only the barest of inspiration. Where … Continue reading Now Playing: Captain America: Civil War
Everybody Wants Some!!, the new film written and directed by Richard Linklater, is being officially pitched as a spiritual sequel to Dazed and Confused, the belatedly beloved sophomore effort from the filmmaker. Dazed and Confused was something of a dud … Continue reading Now Playing: Everybody Wants Some!!
10 Cloverfield Lane is the feature directorial debut of Dan Trachtenberg, and it credits John Campbell, Matthew Stuecken, and Whiplash filmmaker Damien Chazelle as crafters of the story and screenplay. And yet the name that looms over it is that of producer J.J. Abrams. This could be understandably explained by the studio’s enthusiasm to the film to the contributing creator who presided over the all-time top grossing film at the domestic box office, even if he achieved that particular inside-the-park home run after starting on third base. Instead, 10 Cloverfield Lane feels like it belongs to Abrams because it adheres to his … Continue reading Now Playing: 10 Cloverfield Lane
The Witch opens on a face. Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), a teen-aged girl is staring forward with a delicate mixture of worry and disbelief as her family is drummed out of a community of the basis of religious views in combat. … Continue reading Now Playing: The Witch
Much as I’m a devoted disciple of the work of the Coen brothers, I can admit there are all sorts of forecastable reasons to expect that a new film they’ve made might not quite work. The susceptibility to recurring flaws isn’t an automatic outcome of having such clear cinematic voices, but Joel and Ethan Coen have committed themselves so thoroughly to a bleakly comic outlook tinged with ironic detachment, a quality often conveyed with self-consciously rambunctious visuals, that certain predictable troubles can easily reoccur. Most noticeably, their viewpoint can manifest as a lack of sincerity that sets a narrative slamming into a … Continue reading Now Playing: Hail, Caesar!
It is probably my own fault, believing on the scantest of evidence that director Alejandro González Iñárritu had found a new avenue for his artistic expression. As problematic as Birdman might be as the reigning Academy Award winner for Best Picture, particularly over Richard Linklater’s remarkable Boyhood, it signaled a useful shift in the filmmaker’s blindingly self-satisfied march through ever-mounting misery. The film still trafficked in overt nihilism, but couching it in the wryest comedy gave it just enough of a tinge of enlightenment to make it devilishly engaging rather than redundantly soul-deadening. If The Revenant is an accurate example … Continue reading Now Playing: The Revenant
In this era of Caitlyn Jenner and loads of respectful awards attention paid to the Amazon series Transparent, it’s tempting to look at the tepid, staid The Danish Girl as sadly behind the times in its depiction of an individual coming to terms with their true self. Then Ricky Gervais returns to the Golden Globes hosting gig with a slew of jokes that utilize cheap, hateful mockery of transgendered individuals as punchlines, the least offensive of which is the dig at Jenner which has stirred the most ire. (The casual derision towards Jeffrey Tambor’s work in Transparent, with Gervais, for … Continue reading Now Playing: The Danish Girl and Joy
Chapter One: The Huckster’s Reintroduction To be fair, Quentin Tarantino has never been anything other than transparent about his convictions. He is an unabashed recycler, a self-aggrandizing showman, a virulent jabber jaw. He is a cinematic con artist of the highest order, taking all the influences that swirl in his head, buffeted by the blizzard winds of his grindhouse-soiled psyche, and spilling them out onto the screen with only the barest hint of deeper introspection. Much as he loves the gamesmanship of movie narrative, from the pleasure of imposing subversion onto the inane to the flawed puzzle box of displaced … Continue reading And it’s paid for and I’m so grateful to be nowhere
Coffee for Two 