Tallulah Review
RATING: (3 STARS) As I was watching Sian Heder’s Tallulah, I couldn’t shake the implausibility of the premise. A young nomadic woman steals the baby of a rich, careless mother? The film offers a title character who is easy to accept as impulsive and destructive, but a kidnapper? Please. Then something funny happened. I started […]
Touchy Feely Review
RATING: (1.5 STARS) Touchy Feely, the latest from writer-director Lynn Shelton, is the dreariest thing this side of Shelton’s hometown of Seattle. If the over-under on smiles cracked by the film’s quartet of main characters was four, I’d take the under. Even worse than the misery is the film’s thematic aimlessness. Shelton got at deep […]
BLU-RAY REVIEW: Margaret
Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret is both a film you’ll want to kiss and a film you’ll want to kill. Ditto its lead character, Lisa Cohen, an upper-middle-class New York teen played so expertly by Anna Paquin. If she seems a bit riper than on HBO’s True Blood, it’s for a good reason; Lonergan filmed Margaret way […]
The Help Review
RATING: (3 STARS) Though relatively lightweight and somewhat manipulative, The Help is nonetheless affecting. It’s the acting that sets it apart from most films of its kind, and with no less than four excellent performances, it’s easy to forgive a film its missteps. I thought some of the characters were frustratingly one-dimensional, but the performances […]
Away We Go Review
RATING: (3 STARS) The first time I heard about Away We Go I was excited. Scranton-ite that I am, I’ll watch almost anything with The Office’s John Krasinski, and Sam Mendes is a great director (although I think American Beauty is vastly overrated). But there was one thing that was really bothering me about this project: I […]
