Here’s a movie that’s in no rush to work a path into your head and heart. It’s the intent of Chinese-American filmmaker Chloé Zhao to carve a story out of the real lives of the people she puts on screen; her docu-fiction technique was what distinguished her striking 2015 feature …
Read More »'Tomb Raider' Review: Video-Game Icon Gets 'Run, Lara, Run!' Reboot
She’s the perpetually on-the-move, preposterously curvy heroine of PlayStation RPG fame, the archaeologist with the blazing pistols and the bare midriff. She’s fought dinosaurs and ninjas, dodged poison darts and scaled mountains and leapt over ravines and liberated treasures from more subterranean ruins than you can count. The lady is …
Read More »'Happy End' Review: Michael Haneke Returns With Another Feel-Bad Drama
Austrian writer-director Michael Haneke has made many a masterpiece – and his latest, Happy End, isn’t one of them. Yet this cinematic poke in the eye about an upper class family imploding still exerts a perverse fascination. From early provocations like The Seventh Continent (1989) through later boundary-pushing works like …
Read More »'Quest' Review: Moving Doc on Philly Family Makes the Personal Political
His name is Christopher Rainey, but you can call him “Quest” – that’s the nickname this North Philly resident is known by. Christine’a Rainey, his wife and a women’s shelter employee, is sometimes called “Ma Quest,” usually by the folks who drop by her spouse’s recording studio for his “Freestyle …
Read More »'The Shape of Water': Girl-Meets-Monster Romance Is Haunting, Beautiful
If you think it’s high time that Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro joined fellow Mexican auteurs Alfonso Cuaron (Gravity) and Alejandro González Iñárritu (Birdman, The Revenant) in the Oscar winners circle, The Shape of Water just may be the movie to do it. The Academy typically turns up its nose …
Read More »'BPM (Beats Per Minute)' Review: Searing Look at Love in the Time of AIDS
A wrenching love story, set in Paris in the early 1990s, told against the background of HIV/AIDS activists battling against government and pharmaceutical indifference as they fight for their lives. The group is ACT UP-Paris and the movie is BPM (Beats Per Minute), an impassioned and incendiary cry from the …
Read More »'Woodshock': Kirsten Dunst Goes Cuckoo in Compelling, Cracked Debut
Part art project, part woozy waking dream and partRepulsion for the edible-consuming crowd, Kate and Laura Mulleavy’s psychological thriller-cum-canabisized character study follows Theresa (Kirsten Dunst), a troubled young women working at a marijuana dispensary in Eureka, California. Our Sad-Eyed Lady of the Redwoods is known for an illicit, under-the-counter strain …
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