Life is but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more
“How do you want your funeral?”
“With my friends laughing, and if anybody cries, he pays for the drinks.”
“And on your stone?”
“‘Try it yourself'”
Accattone, the directorial debut of Pier Paolo Pasolini, has been called the last film of Continue reading Accattone (1961) Movie Review
Patricia Dombrowski (Danielle Macdonald) is a 23 year old woman who lives with her mother (Bridget Everett) and grandmother (Cathy Moriarty) in suburban New Jersey. She works as a bartender, but that is not enough to make ends meet with her grandmother’s medical bills and her mother out of work. She has dreams of leaving this rundown life behind her and moving to New York to pursue her rap career.
Her boyfriend Jheri (Siddharth Dhananjay) pushes her to this end, goading her into Continue reading Patti Cakes (2017) Movie Review
Good Time opens on a brutal scene in which the mentally handicapped Nick (Benny Safdie, who also co-directs) free associates with a psychiatrist. It is a scene told entirely in tight closeups. Nick stares on at the therapist, at first emptily as he struggles to answer the questions in abstract ways. Then, his still blank face breaks into tears. It is a truly engaging scene that effectively draws you into the film.
In this scene, it is not immediately clear where Nick is or why he is there. All we have is the claustrophobic moment of Continue reading Good Time (2017) Movie Review
Birth of the Dragon is a biopic of legendary martial arts and action film star Bruce Lee (portrayed here by Philip Ng). It tells the story of his rise to prominence in the Western world, and the confrontation between him and martial arts master Wong Jack Man (Xia Yu).
Except, Birth of the Dragon really wants to focus on Continue reading Birth of the Dragon (2017) Movie Review
Based on the memoir by Jeannette Wells, The Glass Castle tells the story of four children raised in an inconstant, emotionally troubling household. The family, led by an alcohol abusing patriarch (Woody Harrelson), moves from squat house to squat house to avoid paying taxes. The children do not go to school. The family, at one point, resorts to showering at the public pool.
The films feels most readily akin to last year’s Captain Fantastic. Only, it lacks the Continue reading The Glass Castle (2017) Movie Review
Kathryn Bigelow, known most recently as the director of war films The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, depicts a different sort of war in Detroit.
Told in three acts, Detroit covers the 1967 rebellion of Detroit citizens against a racist police force. Following the raid of an illegal club, riots against the Detroit police begin, escalating to the point where Continue reading Detroit (2017) Movie Review
Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk is by no means quiet, but it is noticeably mute. In its introduction, Tommy (Fionn Whitehead), a young English soldier caught in the city of Dunkirk surrounded by the fast-burning German army, meanders the abandoned streets with other emaciated young soldiers. No one speaks. Sullenly they walk about, only to be gunned down by unseen Germans.
The first line of dialogue we hear is more of a yelp, as Tommy exclaims his allied status to a blockade of troops, scrambling to make it to Continue reading Dunkirk (2017) Movie Review
The setup to Win it All, the new film from director Joe Swanberg who co-wrote the film with its star Jake Johnson, is an anticipatory slippery slope. Compulsive gambler Eddie (Johnson) is left with a shady bag of cash. We know what is about to happen. He knows it too, repeating “Oh, no” with a nervous dread.
Eddie starts on an uptick. An on-screen counter shows us as he Continue reading Win it All (2017) Movie Review
In a wooded hideaway in Virginia is a school for girls led by Miss Martha (Nicole Kidman). Three years deep into the Civil War, Confederate patrols make their way through the area frequently, but Martha and the girls also lie in fear of potential Yankee parties. They whisper stories of Union soldiers raping Southern women, painting uncivilized pictures of the unseen army.
It is understandable, then, that the inhabitants of the plantation take to wounded soldier Cpl. John McBurney (Colin Farrell) with Continue reading The Beguiled (2017) Movie Review
Ana Lily Amirpour’s debut as a feature director came in the form of the genre-bending vampire romance film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. The film, shot in supple black and white over a soundtrack of trance-inducing electronica and angsty punk, was a beautiful piece about maintaining relationships in an environment rife with isolation.
On paper, Amirpour’s second film The Bad Batch exists in a similar world. Arlen (Suki Waterhouse) is released from “Bad Batch” prison into the desert wilderness of the Texas-Mexico border.
A dystopian world in which cannibalism is a viable form of survivable (viable to the point of being morally questionable as opposed to morally intolerable), isolation is all Arlen has. Especially after she is captured by a family of cannibals and Continue reading The Bad Batch (2017) Movie Review
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