The World’s End, the final instalment in Edgar Wright/Simon Pegg/Nick Frost’s goofily-name Cornetto Trilogy, is a funny, touching, and visually inventive late-summer masterpiece. It’s easily my favorite of the trilogy (surpassing Shaun of the Dead in actuality, although I don’t know that anything can replace the experience of first seeing Shaun of the Dead with […]
If you want a witty, well-informed take down of all the reasons Austenland fails as both a film and as a celebration of all things Austen, please go read A.A. Dowd’s awesome missive on the AV Club*. Although sometimes I find it really fun to deconstruct a shitty movie for all the ways it reinforces […]
The Spanish phenomena in filmmaking, Pedro Almodovar, who has received a worldwide recognition for his string of masterpieces: All About My Mother (1999), Talk to Her (2002), Volver (2006), Broken Embraces (2009), etc. cheers up his followers with one, bizarre as ever, film parody I’m So Excited! Essential in their graphic explorations of sexuality, Almodovar’s […]
I had absolutely no knowledge on this film going in. I had not even seen the trailers or knew what exactly the concept was. With a name like ‘The Conjuring’ and looking at its poster some fairly accurate guesses can be made about the premise. I thought I was in for another bland, cheap thrill […]
A lot of coverage of the acclaimed Sundance film Fruitvale Station has centered on the Trayvon Martin connection. It makes sense. The tragedy that the film depicts shares DNA with the tragedy that captured America’s attention: young black man killed while unarmed, for seemingly very little reason. Hell, the two stories even share a “marijuana bag” […]
Remember those 80’s and 90’s summer vacation movies with everlasting humor? The ones with parents chilling out by the beach, acting like children, and children entering adulthood; the ones that offer escape from the monotony of everyday life shaped up by demanding careers and addictive electronics; the ones that last forever in our memories and […]
The trailer for Only God Forgives is absolutely remarkable. Stylized cinematography with a glowing rufous aura of revenge is cloaked in tension-rising techno that shadows the slow-reactions of actor Ryan Gosling. With a firm R-rating, the two-minute trailer introduces a samurai-sword-carrying-killer-cop and a mother asking her youngest son to avenge the murder of his older […]
I’ve spent a lot of time this summer in a movie theater. Scratch that. I spend a lot of time EVERY summer in a movie theater. So trust when I say that Pacific Rim, Guillermo Del Toro’s robots versus sea monster opus, is the quintessential summer movie. It starts with the overwrought narration, provided by […]