Review: An Oversimplification of Her Beauty
RECOMMENDED The swooningly romantic, love-hexed, film-crazed, captivating, restless “An Oversimplification of Her Beauty,” Terence Nance’s debut feature, is a teeming portmanteau mixed-media reverie on...
View ArticleReview: Augustine
RECOMMENDED Alice Winocour’s sweetly fevered Belle Époque based-on-fact sexual-coming-of-age tale “Augustine” matches a nineteen-year-old kitchen maid with seizures (Soko) with a neurologist,...
View ArticleReview: Ain’t Them Bodies Saints
RECOMMENDED They live and die by night: David Lowery’s second feature, “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints,” is a muted whisper of flash and filigree in a Texas-outlaw-couple-fable-cum-triangle, envisioned in...
View ArticleReview: Laurence Anyways
RECOMMENDED “Laurence Anyways” is drenching melodrama, reckless, ravishing. Actor-writer-director Xavier Dolan has shot a fourth feature since, and he’s still only twenty-four. His style, to some, may...
View ArticleReview: Cutie And The Boxer
RECOMMENDED Documentarian Zachary Heinzerling spent several years following a hate-love-hate relationship between two elderly Japanese-New Yorker artists, Ushio “Gyu-Chan” Shinohara and Noriko...
View ArticleReview: Enough Said
RECOMMENDED Wry and bittersweet, miniaturist 06: this man was made for grown-up romantic comedy. Fuck, it hurts when that foreseeable title rises up among the first of the end titles—“For Jim”—a...
View ArticleReview: Her
RECOMMENDED It’s nearly the future, but it’s just now for Theodore Twombly, a successful professional writer of assuredly sentimental personal letters. The world is more automated than anything...
View ArticleReview: The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty
Ben Stiller has been talking up a film of James Thurber’s 1939 short story, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” for a very, very long time. And, $90 million later, here it is. The adaptation by Steve...
View ArticleReview: Blue Is The Warmest Color
RECOMMENDED Abdellatif Kechiche’s Cannes-prized three-hour feature has tender supporters and bitter detractors (including Julie Maroh, the young author of the graphic novel the film is based upon), but...
View ArticleReview: The Invisible Woman
RECOMMENDED Fiennes is fine: “The Invisible Woman,” Ralph Fiennes’ delicate, deliberately-paced second feature as director, chronicles the true-life romance between Charles Dickens (Fiennes) and a...
View ArticleIt’s All About Love: The Musical Romance of “Broken Circle Breakdown”
By Ray Pride “Beards, bluegrass,” I start, and my friend frowns, “tragic and perhaps doomed romance”—“Okay, now keep going,” she says—“plus a female protagonist who has her own tattoo parlor.” “I’m...
View ArticleLife, And Movies, As A Long Quiet River: Sundance Standouts Ebert, James,...
By Ray Pride Like his subject, Steve James’ “Life Itself” is a piece of work. Packing seventy years of the life of Chicago’s own Roger Ebert into a swift, swinging two hours, the director of “Hoop...
View ArticleReview: The Lego Movie
RECOMMENDED Sometimes scheduling keeps a reviewer from getting to a movie before it opens, and sometimes, that’s just Awesome. In the case of the exceptional “The Lego Movie,” from directors Phil Lord...
View ArticleThe State of Things: Looking Into the EU Film Festival
By Ray Pride A beautiful French teenager turns to prostitution, no explanation given. A Romanian film director prepares in the days before shooting a film: language is worse groundwork than silence,...
View ArticleReview: Le Week-end
RECOMMENDED The genial yet barbed “Le Week-end” is another sort of dirty laundry from Hanif Kureishi, the writer of “My Beautiful Laundrette,” and one more piquant take on sexual and romantic intimacy...
View ArticleReview: Only Lovers Left Alive
RECOMMENDED My first exposure to Jim Jarmusch’s magical “Only Lovers Left Alive” was in thrall to jetlag, and I got its vivid, if woozy sense of the circularity of life, art, dance and the revolution...
View ArticleReview: The Amazing Spider-Man 2
RECOMMENDED Where did Spider-Man come from? What is Peter Parker’s primal trigger to become a vigilante for good? Wow! Can’t believe I stumped you! Yet another explanation’s ready for your perusal in...
View ArticleReview: Chef
RECOMMENDED Jon Favreau’s smart, tasty entertainment finds room for father-son dynamics and a fuckload of swearing. A fuckload. Favreau’s foodie fantasia serves up chef Carl Casper, near-Schnabelesque...
View ArticleReview: Blue Is The Warmest Color
RECOMMENDED Abdellatif Kechiche’s Cannes-prized three-hour feature has tender supporters and bitter detractors (including Julie Maroh, the young author of the graphic novel the film is based upon), but...
View ArticleReview: The Invisible Woman
RECOMMENDED Fiennes is fine: “The Invisible Woman,” Ralph Fiennes’ delicate, deliberately-paced second feature as director, chronicles the true-life romance between Charles Dickens (Fiennes) and a...
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