The Revenant Review
RATING: (1.5 STARS) Hardship is an easy thing to depict on film, but hardship in service of something meaningful to the butts in front of the screen is more of a challenge. 12 Years a Slave is a recent film that pulled it off with flying colors. How? It showed us who its lead character […]
Mad Max: Fury Road Review
RATING: (4 STARS) Holy shit. Thirty years is a long time to wait for a new installment in a film franchise, but Mad Max: Fury Road overcomes this problem for a variety of reasons. Firstly, director George Miller simply doesn’t care if you’re familiar with what’s come before. He’s also smart enough to forge a […]
The 20 Best Performances of 2014
It was a great year for acting, and I still haven’t seen some of the year’s most acclaimed performances. If David Oyelowo (Selma), Julianne Moore (Still Alice), Benedict Cumberbatch (The Imitation Game), J.K. Simmons (Whiplash), Timothy Spall (Mr. Turner), Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Beyond the Lights), or anyone else bowls me over the way they have so […]
The Drop Review
RATING: (3.5 STARS) Anyone going into The Drop should know not to expect much in the way of plot surprises. It’s a thriller, yes, but it’s very straightforward, and it treads territory covered in films all too regularly. That said, there’s something very surprising about how fresh the material seems. Lowlife criminals find themselves in […]
Lawless Review
RATING: (3 STARS) It’s hard to think of a more appropriate title for John Hillcoat’s new Prohibition drama than Lawless (though the title of the novel the film is based on—The Wettest County in the World—is a close second). The film takes place in Franklin County, Virginia during the early 1930s—an area of the country […]
The Dark Knight Rises Review
RATING: (3.5 STARS) With The Dark Knight Rises, the stirring finale to the wildly successful post-millennial Batman trilogy, director and cowriter Christopher Nolan laughs in the face of staggeringly high expectations and gives us perhaps the grandest of all superhero movies. The movie itself is this big, hulking monster—not unlike its main villain—but its flaws […]
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy Review
RATING: (4 STARS) Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a superior thriller that accomplishes the unfathomable in condensing John le Carré’s masterful British espionage novel into an appropriately dense but followable two-hour film. And shockingly, not a ton of important detail is lost in the translation. Director Tomas Alfredson (following up the sensational Let the Right […]
Warrior Review
RATING: (3 STARS) Warrior is too long. It’s cliched as hell. It’s manipulative. Parts feel forced and artificial. It’s overstuffed with subplots. And it’s totally unbelievable. But hell if I didn’t get caught up in it all. I found myself groaning and rolling my eyes far more than I’d like, but I’m a sucker for […]
Inception Review
RATING: (4 STARS) The hype had been building up for months, years even—ever since “The Dark Knight†blew people’s minds in 2008. With the keys to the kingdom, just what was Christopher Nolan capable of? “Inception†answers that question—he’s capable of creating an absolutely wild world in which anything is possible and everything is believable. […]
