Midnight’s Children (London Film Festival review)
Elegant looking and well intentioned, but epically bloated and choking on its own would-be grand metaphor…
drama
The Comedian (London Film Festival review)
Lends a fresh depth of honesty and intimacy to a story that feels familiar on the surface but has rarely been plumbed with such insight or candor.
Casa de Mi Padre (review)
A little bit Mel Brooks, a little bit Airplane!: subtle humor that slips under your radar instead of bashing you over the head is what makes Casa one of the more adventurous comedies in recent years…
Now Is Good (review)
Why does Dakota Fanning get to really live onscreen here in a way that Teh Movies don’t usually allow girls to do? Because she’s dying.
End of Watch (review)
David Ayer has pulled off an all-new LAPD cop action drama with a vibrancy so electric that the screen seems to sing from the film’s opening moments, and keeps ringing long after the film ends.
Premium Rush (review)
In real life, a bike messenger with a death wish is an urban hazard. But in a zippy popcorn flick and played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt? He’s a charmer…
Anna Karenina (review)
There is no pretense that we’re getting a realistic depiction of late-19th-century Russia. Director Joe Wright isn’t merely crafting a metaphor about the social structures under which we all live: he’s underscoring the artificiality of cinema itself.
Lawless (review)
An outsider’s look at a unique moment in American history, the gigantic failed social experiment of Prohibition: withering yet hugely engaging and ringing with unspoken critical parallels with today’s “war on drugs.”
Shadow Dancer (review)
Even the marvelous performances by Clive Owen and Andrea Riseborough are not enough to ratchet up the drama to the level of the totally gripping, which is a damn shame and something of a puzzler…
The Bourne Legacy (review)
This is Bourne fan fiction. But it’s the rare sort of good fanfic: utterly inconsequential, of course, but a whole lotta fun. It’s a turn-your-brain-off popcorn flick for people who don’t like to turn our brains off just because we’re at The Movies.
