The Double review: now you see him… again
A painfully funny odyssey of personal ineffectualness that is bitterly wonderful in how it revels in the decrepit horror of the everyday world.
2014 theatrical releases
Visitors review: stare into the face of humanity
A weirdly beautiful film, eerie in its complicated simplicity, and open to seven billion interpretations, all of them valid.
Tom at the Farm review: shoulda stayed in the city
An overwrought pastiche of Hitchcock that makes less sense and renders its protagonist far less plausible the longer it goes on.
Rio 2 review: jungle feeble
This is what passes for a children’s movie these days: a 1950s sitcom drawn in pretty tropical CGI colors with a few mostly forgettable songs tossed in.
Cheap Thrills review: in debasement
The movie equivalent of a mean girls’ game whose only goal is humiliation. Also: a failed parable of the twistedness of the 1 percent.
Le Week-end review: la vie et le bonheur
A marvelous little unpacking of the meaning of happiness, precisely what constitutes it, and how to know whether you’ve found it.
Noah review: The Bible Episode IV: A New Hope
A Biblical action disaster fantasy epic that is completely bonkers, endlessly entertaining, and actually religious in that inspiring-and-instructional way.
Locker 13 review: no fresh hell
Nothing here is terribly haunting, but at least someone is trying to make something like a horror movie these days that isn’t about gore and torture.
The Borderlands review: Sunday worst
Finds absolutely nothing new in the supposedly spooky found-footage subgenre, unless all the typical haunted-house frights occurring in a church counts.
Veronica Mars review: fan service included
I’ve never seen the show that spawned it, but it was still exactly what I was expecting. I am neither overwhelmed nor underwhelmed by it. I am whelmed.
