The Hunger Games, which stretched on for a movie too long as well, at least had the good sense to end each one with a cliffhanger. (Even Twilight did that.) Divergent, the Shailene Woodley-starring Games ripoff that’s on film three of four, conversely ends as would a television series on the bubble—each installment could continue on, but if for some […]
Reviews
Posted inArts + Music
Review: Born To Be Blue
This Very Canadian Biopic stars Ethan Hawke as Chet Baker, who in the ’60s was womped by his drug dealer’s goons and had all his teeth knocked out. Teeth are pretty important to a trumpet player! Writer director Robert Budreau does the smart biopic take—instead of trying for a life overview, he covers a specific era, during which Baker is […]
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Review: Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
Tina Fey plays her least Tina Fey-iest character in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, a book she optioned because a reviewer called the author a “Tina Fey character.” We begin in 2003, where Fey’s Kim Baker (her real-life counterpoint is Kim Barker; why the single-letter name change?) has just been deployed from her boring job writing teleprompter […]
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Review: Nina Forever
Nina Forever is about a morbid oddball-couple, which, if you’ve seen Corpse Bride, Let the Right One In, or Only Lovers Left Alive, will sound like familiar territory. Though this British movie (which is being sold as a horror-comedy, but that strikes me as stretching definitions of horror and comedy) barely digs beneath its surface, […]
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Review: 45 Years
Between the lyrical, lovely Weekend and the short-lived cult favourite Looking, on HBO, writer-director Andrew Haigh has pushed the modern gay man—well, the white, fit, reasonably well-to-do one—past tired, lingering stereotypes and into a place more complex and interesting (altogether now: human). So his latest is something of a curveball: A pair of senior citizens (Academy Award nominee Charlotte Rampling and […]
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Review: Kung Fu Panda 3
As far as movie franchises go, you can do much worse than Kung Fu Panda, which stars Jack Black as a panda destined to be a great martial artist. The voice cast is big-time and wonderful: Dustin Hoffman as the tiny sensei Shifu, Angelina Jolie as the stoic Tigress, Seth Rogen as Mantis, Lucy Liu as Viper and David […]
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Review: Son of Saul
Unlike most Holocaust movies, Son of Saul doesn’t go out of its way to show you the horrors; in this Cannes Grand Prix winner directed by László Nemes (making his feature debut), the atrocities pile up in the corners, on the edges, often out-of-focus or, worse, via the film’s human score of whispers, screams and […]
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Review: The Revenant
On the long list of movie executive excuses not to make things—“A gay person can’t play straight!” “Men don’t like women’s stories!” “People don’t want to see movies about minorities!” “No one will believe a 57 year-old man could be in love with a 50-year-old woman!”—no one thought to add “Leonardo DiCaprio as the doting […]
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Review: Carol
Of his time-period-hopping contemporaries—the Coens, Tarantino, Linklater—it’s Todd Haynes who uses era most effectively, not merely as a cool framing device or something to subvert with modern language. From Velvet Goldmine’s lurid, woozy ’70s palettes to I’m Not There’s grittiness to, until this, his masterwork Far From Heaven’s lush, painting-like world, he uses era for context and emotion. His characters are […]
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Review: Creed
In one of the laziest years on record, we’ve moved far past sequeldom—never the most dignified place to be, even when talking Toy Story 2—into poorly executed, barely considered, cash-snatching rebootery. Movies like Jurassic World and Peanuts, repackaging the elements green-eyed producers think are what we want, then forgetting to surround them with feeling or, you know, craft. (The upcoming Star Wars […]
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Review: Truth & Spotlight
This month has brought two journalism movies, one a thudding misfire and the other a thrill. The former is Truth, a ham-fisted telling of the chain of events at CBS News that got Dan Rather fired. (Rather unfortunately, it contains a top-notch Cate Blanchett performance very much worth seeing.) The latter is this week’s entry, Spotlight, about the Boston Globe’s […]
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Review: Room
A darling of the fall festival circuit, the Irish-Canadian co-pro Room is worthy of every accolade piled atop its scrappy, sensitive shoulders. Based on Emma Donoghue’s novel, it stars Brie Larson as a woman who was abducted as a teenager and kept in a 10-by-10 shed as a sex slave. This situation has produced a […]