TRANCE: Watch It At Home – Tricky But Unsatisfying Thriller From Danny Boyle TRANCE is both extremely clever and remarkably stupid. I wish I could explain exactly how, but Danny Boyle’s thriller, written by John Hodge and Joe Ahearne, has the kind of story that piles reversals on twists on reveals, so there’s not […]
THE SUNLIT NIGHT (no distrib): The last thing one would have expected from the director of the genuinely scabrous Wetlands was a follow-up that seems to trying to meld NY Jewish comedy with the kind of enchanted romcom spirit of Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero. But that’s what David Wnendt has given us, and the […]
Earnest and low-key to a fault, Liza Johnson’s HATESHIP LOVESHIP might have felt more at home in the Narrative Competition at Sundance than in Toronto. It has a dramatic recessiveness, almost a passivity, for much of its length, that makes it hard to see just what kind of story it thinks it’s telling. Ultimately, though, it […]
WAVES (A24 – November 1): Trey Edward Shults’ third film (after the micro-budgeted indie Krisha and the horror movie They Come By Night) manages the remarkable feat of feeling both experimental and grounded, as propulsive as an episode of Euphoria without that show’s smug affectations. There isn’t a lot of plot, and what there […]
ANCHORMAN 2: THE LEGEND CONTINUES: Watch It At Home – Fun But Overextended Silliness ANCHORMAN 2: THE LEGEND CONTINUES runs 119 minutes, which is rather too much of a not-bad thing (the original Anchorman, in 2004, was a brisk 94 minutes), but it pales in comparison to the accumulated length of the marketing campaign […]
JULIET, NAKED (no distrib): Every Sundance has a title or two that isn’t particularly “indie,” other than by the fact that its stars aren’t hugely bankable. These aren’t the films that set critical hearts aflutter, but they can be worthwhile all the same. That’s the case with the likable Juliet, Naked, which continues Nick […]
> See Also: 2011 HONORABLE MENTIONS 2011 WORST 10 As a movie year, 2011 felt, more than anything else, like a reflection of an art and a business in disarray. Economically, it was a down year and for the major studios, a frightening one: beyond the special case of the Harry Potter finale, virtually […]
THE LORAX: Not Even For Free – A Seussian Mess It may not be pretty, but surely it’s true–Credit must go where credit is due. In this case, that means the Universal Pictures Marketing Department, which as it turns out has done a splendid job these last few weeks of hiding just […]