Category: 3 Stars
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A Clique of Cranks: Room 237
Room 237 is not about The Shining. It is about those lost in its labyrinth. For better or for worse, Stanley Kubrick is one of the most potent gateway drugs for young cinephiles, and for many the early obsession proves lifelong. The addictive nature of his films is partly due to their own air of…
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Radiohead: Meeting People is Easy…
…but being invited to your own party is hard. I remember liking Grant Gee’s Radiohead documentary Meeting People is Easy when I first saw it in the late nineties, but now it just looks like a simplistic feature-length exposé of how music journos are twits that ruin everything.
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Snausage Fest: Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs
I was rather astonished to find Isle of Dogs defeat my expectations and become one of my least favorite Wes Andersons, if not the least. Anderson is one of my absolute favorite filmmakers (I know, I know, join the club), but like a lot of my faves, I have significant reservations. It’s no great insight…
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The Accountant is A Brilliant Mind meets Death Wish
You can imagine the elevator pitch: “A Brilliant Mind meets Death Wish! Ben Affleck! Anna Kendrick!” Director Gavin O’Connor’s The Accountant flirts with righteous anger at big business financial corruption, but wimps out by ultimately fingering a single venal individual with a hired army of faceless mercenaries. There’s nothing engaging about a plot that can…
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Businessman, artiste, or madman? We Live in Public
If you dig the deeply cynical TV series Black Mirror, you’ll love this documentary profile of businessman/artiste/madman Josh Harris. Love, hate, or pity him, Harris is undoubtedly a fascinating individual who succumbed to information-age and surveillance state delusion back during a time when we still used terms like “cyber-surfing the information superhighway” to describe the…
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William Friedkin’s The Hunted is solid but unsatisfying
After watching too many sloppily-made thrillers filling up space on Netflix (including Mercury Rising, Double Jeopardy, and Along Came a Spider), it’s a relief the my next choice, The Hunted, is so solidly made. You really can’t expect anything less from William Friedkin. So why is it so unsatisfying? First, it doesn’t really capitalize on…
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James Mangold’s The Wolverine is the right kind of “serious”
I was very pleasantly surprised by James Mangold’s The Wolverine. Everybody involved did the right thing by simply pretending that the appallingly awful X-Men Origins: Wolverine was never made. Marvel Comics continues their (mostly) winning streak, showing everyone how superhero movies should be done. Hopefully soon we will be rid of grimly ultraviolet takes on…
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J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek Into Darkness comes with too much baggage
Long term Star Trek fans may bemoan the fact that the latest films have ejected much of what was previously considered essential ingredients. Gone are the spacey metaphors for what a moral utopian society might look like, not to mention the years of established chronology and backstory. But to old timer Trekkers I say: too…
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Once revolutionary, Scream now feels quaint
It’s easy to forget how revolutionary Wes Craven’s Scream seemed in 1996, and how influential it’s been since. Rewatching it 17 years later, I’m struck by how… well, quaint it seems in retrospect. Now every post-Scream horror movie is required to be a postmodern deconstruction of the genre. Maybe the trend reached its apotheosis with The Cabin…
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Apart Hate: District Neill Blomkamp’s District 9
Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 is an old story told many times in fiction and history: an undesirable group intrudes upon the space and resources of privileged power possessors. This story never ends well. District 9‘s highly allegorical culture clash corresponds to great many groups that have suffered in throughout history, many sadly ongoing: refugees, minorities,…