Life is but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more
Lee Hayden (Sam Elliott) is a washed up white-hat Western hero dreaming of his next movie while smoking joints and recording voiceover for advertisements. The Hero is a movie about a sad old man, a lightly humorous meditation on living with differing physical and mental ages.
Diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, Lee wanders through his twilight existence trying to find Continue reading The Hero (2017) Movie Review
Golden Exits is a film about the over-lapping lives of people they don’t make movies about, as admitted by the film itself.
Nick (Adam Horovitz), a mild-mannered archivist, is married to the increasingly depressive Alyssa (Chloe Sevigny), who is sisters of Gwen (Mary Louise Parker), a client of Nick dealing with the death of her father, who has an intimate relationship with the mentally troubled Sam (Lily Rabe), who is friends with consoling Jess (Analeigh Tipton), who is married to her boss Buddy (Jason Schwartzman). And all wrapped up in this is a young Australian woman abroad in New York (Emily Browning).
Browning’s Naomi is a character that the film touts as a glorified siren, a sexual object to tempt Continue reading Golden Exits (2017) Movie Review
A father’s (Peter Simonischek) desperate, juvenile attempts at reaching his over-worked white collar daughter (Sandra Huller) is the subject of Toni Erdmann. Dressing up in fake teeth and a wig, the father becomes the titular character, a fictional businessman who is occasionally a life coach and occasionally a German ambassador. He follows his daughter around, sending her work life in flux during a time where securing a client is pivotal.
Toni Erdmann is a film that boasts its Continue reading Toni Erdmann (2016) Movie Review
Ray Wentworth (Bob Odenkrik) is a greeting card writer. The best, if you ask him. We first see him looking down the barrel of the camera in closeup, waxing poetic about the poetics of card writing. Writing novels are for hacks who cannot edit themselves. Cards are the real challenge.
Following this, Ray is Continue reading Girlfriend’s Day (2017) Movie Review
The opening shot of Tim Sutton’s Dark Night, coming after almost a minute of music playing over a black screen, is a beautiful yet unceremoniously conventional shot. It is the reflexive kino eye shot, showing the awareness of artifice and mediation within a filmic representation.
Gorgeous red and blue neon washes over the eye of an onlooker. We can see the approaching police car in her pupil. It is tragedy in a snapshot; fundamentally artistic even if the eyeball shot has appeared everywhere from Un Chien Andalou to LOST.
Dark Night chronicles the lives of those affected by the 2012 Aurora shooting that took place in a Colorado screening of the film The Dark Knight Rises. The film is proposed as a Continue reading Dark Night (2017) Movie Review
Director Chan-wook Park is not afraid to push buttons. He’s not afraid to be different. Not afraid to indulge.
The Handmaiden may be Chan-wook Park’s most button-pushing, different, indulgent film to date.
In 1930s Korea, a woman named Sook-hee (Tae-ri Kim) is hired to be the handmaiden of a wealthy Japanese heiress Lady Hideko (Min-hee Kim). But nothing is what meets the eye. Nothing. Sook-hee is Continue reading The Handmaiden (2016) Movie Review
The story of the people on board the Deepwater Horizon during the BP oil spill are the subjects of the Peter Berg feature Deepwater Horizon. As with other Berg films, it is a cinema verite style affair, with plenty of handheld shots following right over the shoulder of our heroes. That is, when indulgent crane shots aren’t taking snapshots of the glorious landscapes.
These aforementioned heroes, namely Mike Williams (Mark Wahlberg), are quippy, fast-talking working folk who feel something is up as soon as Continue reading Deepwater Horizon (2016) Movie Review
Son of the headmaster of his prep school, Jason Hodges (Alex Saxon) gets more than he bargains for during a mundane field trip to the U.S. Mint. While Jason attempts to get the school “hacker” to change his bio grade, his father is arrested for embezzling.
In the fallout of this, the school is forced to enact cuts to all extracurricular activities. And this is an adequate amount of parts for a Continue reading Coin Heist (2017) Movie Review
Ray Kroc (Michael Keaton) travels from food joint to food joint trying to sell a five-spindle milkshake mixer. No one bites, but as he sits defeated at these drive-in restaurants, he notices a trend. A trend of slowness, inaccuracy.
When a small, bustling outfit out of San Bernadino named McDonald’s orders an inexplicable eight mixers for one location, Kroc is Continue reading The Founder (2016) Movie Review
Jesuit priest Cristovao Ferreira (Liam Neeson), amid a 17th century Japanese mission environment of torture and persecution, reportedly apostatizes the Christian faith to prevent more Japanese converts from being harmed.
Two young priests who were raised into the faith under the tutelage of Ferreira, Father Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Father Garupe (Adam Driver), decide to venture to Japan to find Ferreira and an explanation.
When Rodrigues and Garupe land on the Japanese shore, it becomes clear that their resolve may not be enough for what they are up against. In a delightfully simple move, Scorsese shows the two Portuguese priests with Continue reading Silence (2016) Movie Review
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