THE SURVIVOR (no distrib): So many films and television productions have tackled the subject of the Holocaust over the decades that it takes real effort to break through with a story that feels fresh. Barry Levinson’s The Survivor is his strongest film in years, and it manages to have an impact. The script by […]
The screenwriter James Vanderbilt has made his directing debut with TRUTH, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival tonight, and at times it’s clear that this is a writer’s movie: Vanderbilt gives no fewer than three of his characters the opportunity for a Rousing Final Speech, something another director might well have toned down. […]
V/H/S, which screened as part of Sundance’s Park City At Midnight series, is a gimmick piled upon a gimmick. First is the horror anthology itself, familiar from the Twilight Zone movie and Rod Serling’s Night Gallery TV show, among many others. In this case, half a dozen unrelated short films, each from a different […]
TOY’S HOUSE is a delightful Sundance surprise, a fresh take on adolescent boys coming of age. The conceit of Jordan Vogt-Roberts’ film, written by Chris Galletta, is that Joe Toy (Nick Robinson), his best friend Patrick (Gabriel Basso), and a very strange tagalong named Biaggio (Moises Arias) don’t just run away, they literally find an […]
INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS: Buy A Ticket – 1960s Folk Music A La The Coens INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS, which screened as the Closing Night presentation of the AFI Film Festival in advance of its regular run next month, is Joel and Ethan Coen in their enigmatically allegorical mode, but unlike its more overtly stylized predecessors Barton […]
Like his Oscar-winning A Separation, Asghar Farhadi’s THE PAST is concerned with the abyss of uncertainty and mystery that lies under seemingly straightforward actions, the ever-increasing complications that become evident whenever one scrutinizes the events and motives of everyday life. Although the setting this time is Paris, and the characters aren’t the same, in many ways, The […]
LA LA LAND (Summit/Lionsgate – December 2): No film arrived at Toronto this year with more hype to live up to than Damien Chazelle’s La La Land, the follow-up to the filmmakers’s Oscar-winning Whiplash and the recipient of white-hot raves in Venice (where Emma Stone won the Best Actress award) and Telluride. Chazelle’s rapturous […]
MARRIAGE STORY (Netflix – November 6 in theatres/December 6 streaming): A film doesn’t have to be revolutionary to be great. There may be no subjects more intensively depicted in movies and on television than marital break-ups and the miseries of divorce, yet Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story is so fully realized and brilliantly performed that […]