Life is but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more
As far as mumblecore goes–a genre defined by its hyper-naturalism–Your Sister’s Sister comes off as one of the most natural.
Unmotivated and perhaps alcohol dependent Jack (Mark Duplass) has just spent a year without his late brother Tom. He has no Continue reading Your Sister’s Sister (2011) Movie Review
The Danish Girl, from director Tom Hooper, revolves around painter Einar Wegener (Eddie Redmayne) in 1920s Copenhagen. Einar undergoes a struggle with gender identity that threatens to compromise his career and his marriage with his wife Gerda (Alicia Vikander).
Calculated shot choices and Desplat’s lightly vibrant score accompany a Continue reading The Danish Girl (2015) Movie Review
In Patrick Vollrath’s Alles Wird Gut, a divorcee picks his daughter Lea (Julia Pointner) up for a day at the fair. Only, something is tonally disjointed from this, what should be a lighthearted affair.
We begin by seeing the father Michael (Simon Schwarz) waiting anxiously at the gate of Continue reading Alles Wird Gut (Everything Will Be Okay) Short Film Review
Brooklyn is a film starring Saoirse Ronan as a young Irish emigre, Eilis, who moves to New York in the early 1950s to find work, leaving behind a mother and sister as a result. In Brooklyn, she stays at a boarding house with four other women of differing personality, works at a department store (but takes night classes to become a bookkeeper), and falls for a young Italian man named Tony (Emory Cohen).
The film makes a marked transition from Eilis’s process of immigration and settling into her new world to her Continue reading Brooklyn (2015) Movie Review
In Room, a mother (Brie Larson) and son Jack (Jacob Tremblay) are held captive in a tool shed that they call Room. The mother has been there for seven years. Jack is five years old, and he has never set foot outside of Room in his entire life.
Room is a story of resilience and undying familial love. It is about a woman coping with stress under extreme trauma while also having to successfully raise a child. It is also Continue reading Room (2015) Movie Review
Charlie (Josephine Japy) lives in a household demarcated by fighting parents. She hears her mother sob at night. At school, she becomes quietly fascinated by new student Sarah (Lou de Laage). Sarah is more impulsive, more charismatic than Charlie. They are foils, and yet their chemistry is instantaneous.
Their relationship grows when they vacation together, but it grows toward the realm of the complicated. Lines are grayed. And all the while, Continue reading Respire (Breathe) (2015) Movie Review
I Believe in Unicorns is a bildunsroman of a seemingly average order. A teenage outcast–one who is childlike in a way that she shouldn’t be, but somehow it makes perfect sense–falls for a rebellious skater/punk with long hair and unnatural charisma.
The two, Davina (Natalia Dyer) and Sterling (Peter Vack), have a love story. Davina is virginal and naive, yet her voiceover narration (seemingly looking back on the events) is very grounded in the reality of the situation.
Davina and Sterling run away together to start an exciting and spontaneous life on their own. Davina abandons her Continue reading I Believe in Unicorns (2015) Movie Review
