From minute one of Deadpool, it is clear that we are dealing with a wholly unique film. If you didn’t know what you were getting into with this film, the opening credits sequence explains it for your rather efficiently.
Given a film that never Continue reading Deadpool (2016) Movie Review
Jafar Panahi’s Taxi begins on an extended POV take of a taxi picking up passengers in Tehran. These passengers engage in a long debate over the ethics of execution as a deterrent of crime. It is a strangely humorous meditation in the poetic form of bickering.
Taxi is a series of vignettes told exclusively from Continue reading Taxi (2015) Movie Review
Over, the short film from director Jorn Threlfall, begins quietly. We get static long shots of a suburban street. At 11:45 pm. Then at 7:30 pm. The first two minutes are silence, save for ambient noise, as we see a couple park their car and cross the street, where they see a letter and a bouquet of flowers near the median. They speculate that someone has died there.
The story soon becomes clear. In reverse chronological order, we get to see Continue reading Over (2015) Short Film Review
World of Tomorrow, the Oscar-nominated short film from Don Hertzfeldt, follows the journey of a young girl Emily (Winona Mae) as she is shown through the memories of the future by her clone (Julia Pott).
The short is a densely-packed 15 minutes that meanders through complexities of time travel, artificial sentience, and love. The simplicity of the Continue reading World of Tomorrow (2015) Short Film Review
Cold Deck opens with a jazzy soundtrack and a warmly-lit montage of poker tables being played. The film zooms in on one particular table, where the players engage in emasculating ball-busting, each jab met with the same uproarious laughter.
One player, Bobby (Stefano Gallo), loses out to the clubs owner, Chips (Paul Sorvino), who takes sympathy on him and lends him some cash.
Bobby works in a factory, but his conversations are all on gambling. It is his lifestyle. Strapped for cash, barely able to Continue reading Cold Deck (2015) Movie 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
People, Places, Things opens on a birthday party for two twin girls. The father, Will (Jemaine Clement), searches for his wife Charlie (Stephanie Allynne), only to find her cheating on him with another man. After an awkwardly comical exchange, their relationship ends. A year later, the pair have split custody over the children.
Will is a graphic novelist, an occupation which is revealed through a wonderful panning shot over a series of comics frames depicting a man in Continue reading People, Places, Things (2015) Movie Review
18 year old Dade (Jonny Lee Miller), aka “Crash Override,” aka “Zero-Cool,” is on parole for a cyber-crime he committed when he was a pre-teen child. On his 18th birthday, he is given access to a computer for the first time since he crashed 1,500 plus computers, resulting in a stock market dip.
Dade falls in with an underground subculture of computer hackers. This group is soon framed for creating a Continue reading Hackers (1995) Movie Review
Teen Wolf is a comedy starring Michael J. Fox as a teenage boy going through changes, but not the changes you would expect. His ears start to have a point. Hair stems with miraculous speed. His eyes glow red when he’s angry.
It’s hard to ignore the aspects of this film that don’t hold up. These moments have Continue reading Teen Wolf (1985) Movie Review
Kung Fury is a 30 minute, throwback spectacle of an action comedy. It is epic in its absurdity. A Miami cop (David Sandberg), after witnessing the death of his partner, who he claims is like a father to him, becomes a kung-fu master after he is struck by lightning and bitten by a cobra. He then must travel back in time to assassinate Hitler after the Fuhrer guns down the police chief.
Sandberg plays the cop gruff and merciless in the best over-the-top way. He is the ultimate lone wolf, speaking only in gruff whispers. It works perfectly with the parodical nature of the film.
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