Review

By Cleaver Patterson. Many years ago, when the American West was still wild and the railway was being used to bring the two coasts of that great nation together, there was a man of the law called John Reid (Armie Hammer). In the midst of the open deserts of Texas […]

By Matthew Sorrento. It would be convenient to view Pacific Rim as a metaphor for its creator. Having abandoned the job of directing Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit, in a widely publicized decision, Guillermo del Toro may have elected to make a simple story, pairing giant aliens versus megaton human-driven bots, […]

By Jacob Mertens.  Yasujiro Ozu makes films that sneak up on you. They may feel simple and slow-paced at first, but the heart of his stories are too delicately expressed, and far too complete, for an audience not to be moved. To call Ozu’s Floating Weeds a masterwork may be […]

By Jacob Mertens.   It would be easy to dismiss Monsters University as a child’s film with little pull for adults, or even to warm to the film’s slapstick and nostalgia for its predecessor and let it be at that. Unlike earlier Pixar films such as Wall-E (2008), which easily transcends […]

By Christopher Sharrett. Disney’s The Lone Ranger might have been a fairly credible revisionist Western were it not for its insistence on buffoonery, on postmodern smugness, the sense that “we know this is just a kiddie serial from the old days, so we’ll acknowledge how sophisticated you are, and throw […]

By Kimberly Behzadi. New on Amazon Instant Watch is Hyde Park on Hudson, the 2012 British historical dramedy starring Bill Murray and Laura Linney and directed by Roger Michell. Mitchell’s film is filled with historical inaccuracies and a heavy fixation on sex and scandal, focusing on the famous weekend where […]

By Matthew Wollin. The Way, Way Back (directed by Nat Faxon and Jim Rash) has the immense benefit of an all-star cast, and it is a pleasure to have a role like that of Caitlyn, a long-suffering employee of a water park, played by Maya Rudolph, who effortlessly projects warmth and […]

By Matthew Wollin. A good idea goes a long way, and in this department, Absence starts out ahead of the crowd. Liz (Erin Way), a woman in her third trimester, falls asleep one night and wakes up to find that she’s no longer pregnant and she has no memory of […]

By Zachariah Rush. By the time Maurice Pialat’s feature film debut, L’enfance nue, was released in 1968, Pialat already had a body of work comprising documentary and short films spanning close to two decades that began with the dark experimental piece Isabelle aux Dombes (1951). L’enfance nue follows young François […]

By Jacob Mertens. “We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Our dried voices, when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless As wind in dry glass Or rats’ feet over broken glass In our dry cellar Shape without form, shade […]