Of the nine Academy Award nominees for Best Picture this year, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close was a shocking addition. At the same time, if there were ever an award for The Most Appropriately Titled Movie, this would certainly be it, for Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn) is extremely loud and ever-so-close for far too much of the […]
In We Need to Talk About Kevin, Eva Khatchadourian is a veritable Lady Macbeth from the opening scene that finds a youthful Eva in an orgiastic frenzy of bodies writhing in eviscerated tomatoes to the painstaking, hand-held-razorblade scraping of red paint that has vandalized her home and refuses to leave her car, despite the squeaky effort of […]
From the cuts between time differentiated by the presence of bruises and broken bones, to the seamless transitions from black and white shootouts to crimson-tinted, slow-motion shots of the prelude and aftermath of carnage, Haywire is vintage Soderbergh – perhaps most in its minimalistic qualities. There are plenty of aesthetic touches and attention paid to detail, whether it […]
It is difficult to recover from one’s death. It’s unnatural, for one. Death is supposed to be final—the full stop. And the promises it brings of transition imply a new—or at least unknown—opportunity. A person is not supposed to be left to wallow in their own decay while the world marches on without them. And living through […]
Like the John Le Carre on which Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is based we are introduced to the story media res as Control (John Hurt) advises “Trust no one Jim, especially not in the mainstream … They’re after my head Jim boy.” Unaware of Control’s intent – or even his name; at this point we only know […]
Driven by Adepero Oduye’s emotionally powerful performance, Pariah tells the story of Alike (Oduye), a seventeen-year-old high school student trying to navigate her surroundings as a lesbian. However, this is less a film for lesbians as much as it is a film with lesbians in it. What I mean to suggest is that Alike’s struggles with […]
Warner Herzog’s newest documentary Into the Abyss is less about whether capital punishment should exist and more about why it does. Herzog’s opinion on lethal injection is no mystery. Within the first ten minutes of the film, he denounces the practice, but doesn’t stoop to demagoguery. Rather, Into the Abyss is a resonating documentary seems to focus […]
From its opening shot of a pastoral landscape in England, War Horse is a beautifully depicted tale of competition, determination, regret, and class –but it’s mostly a story of a boy and his horse. Or, more appropriately, a fairy tale about a boy and his horse, something that the film does not try to hide with […]
Ostensibly, Young Adult is a story of arrested development and perpetual adolescence; however, it’s not the comedy that the previews portend it to be. There are funny moments, but they are, intentionally, uncomfortable, leaving you unsure if the laughter is from circumstance or to cover its depressing reality; in a way, you indulge in the catharsis that […]
On her way to Alaska, “where they need people,” Wendy’s (Michelle Williams) journey gets derailed: her car breaks down, she gets busted for shoplifting, and her dog disappears. However, Wendy and Lucy is less a tale of sentimental friendship between a journeywoman and her faithful dog and more a melancholic story about social and personal mobility. A […]