Review: 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 ArticleGetting Good At It: The Long Gestation of “Obvious Child”
By Ray Pride Gillian Robespierre’s canny, taut “Obvious Child,” a distinctly contemporary comedy, is rich in people talk and how some people swear and how modern audiences laugh, shocked, with...
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: X-Men: Days of Future Past
RECOMMENDED At least one reviewer who’s kept closer watch on the franchise warns, “My advice to you is to not watch the previous ‘X-Men’ films before ‘Days of Future Past’ as the continuity problems...
View ArticleOnce Upon an American Dream: The Haunting Beauty of “The Immigrant”
By Ray Pride Memories upon memories upon memories upon legend upon lore upon sorrow upon sacrifice and ache: there is much of another time in James Gray’s great and tender and sublimely sincere,...
View ArticleReview: Chinese Puzzle
RECOMMENDED French farceur Cédric Klapisch is a maestro of complication, if not complexity. In his original screenplays like “L’auberge espagnole” and “Russian Dolls,” send-ups of whirlwind European...
View ArticleReview: Edge of Tomorrow
RECOMMENDED Don’t we all want a furious, jumbled intelligence like Doug Liman’s to fashion memorable pop? The director of “Go,” “The Bourne Identity” and “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” opens the...
View ArticleReview: The Fault In Our Stars
RECOMMENDED I am bobbing on a sea of a hundred weeping teenage girls. Just now, they were crying inside the theater, too, several hundred more as well. Audibly, physically, unabashedly, visibly sobbing...
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 ArticleWhy Does Anyone Do Anything: Paul Haggis in the “Third Person”
By Ray Pride One of the most bittersweet end credits I’ve seen in recent movies comes at the end of Paul Haggis’ melodrama about jealousy and point-of-view, “Third Person”: “To all the Belgian tax...
View ArticleReview: Begin Again
RECOMMENDED Boy already met girl, girl already left boy, that was “Once.” What can a filmmaker do after a success like that? Writer-director John Carney doesn’t fully succeed Twice, but there are sweet...
View ArticleReview: Mood Indigo
RECOMMENDED “This feeling of solitude is unfair! I demand to fall in love, too.” Michel Gondry’s latest low-fi gallimaufry of incessant innovation and simple, surrealistic fancy, “Mood Indigo,” is...
View ArticleReview: Magic In The Moonlight
Woody Allen’s forty-fourth film, “Magic In The Moonlight,” may be the seventy-eight-year-old writer-director’s strangest in ages. It’s the first movie of his I can remember where all of the actors seem...
View ArticleSigns and Wonders: The Dreamy Ambition of Mike Cahill’s “I Origins”
By Ray Pride “I Origins” blushes with swirls of sensory extravagance, of emotional extremes, of drenching passions and bathetic loss. It’s the sophomore feature of writer-editor-director Mike Cahill,...
View ArticleReview: Guardians Of The Galaxy
RECOMMENDED Another Marvel left-field choice of a seemingly unlikely director pays off, in slightly different fashion than “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” directed by the Russo brothers as a...
View ArticleReview: What If
RECOMMENDED In one of the first scenes in Michael Dowse’s uncompromisingly adorable modern-day romantic comedy, “What If,” Wallace (Daniel Radcliffe) is at a party, a year after the breakup of a...
View ArticleInterview With a Paleontologist: Peter Larson On Sue And “Dinosaur 13″
RECOMMENDED Todd Douglas Miller’s engaging, sometimes enraging feature documentary debut, “Dinosaur 13” chronicles a decade of legal battles over one of the great finds of natural history—the largest,...
View ArticleMeditations in an Emergency: Ira Sachs on “Love is Strange”
By Ray Pride Ira Sachs’ quiet, measured “Love is Strange” captures a forced separation of a couple who’ve been together for thirty-nine years, a painter and a music instructor, played by John Lithgow...
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