Category: Reviews
Reviewing ‘About Elly’: Is Asghar Farhadi the Finest Filmmaker Working Today?
It begins life as an Iranian Big Chill and at the end of Act 1, it morphs into Antonioni’s iconic L’Avventura. But by the time the various plot intrigues have finished spinning out, Asghar Farhadi’s About Elly has emerged as something unique and wondrous: a taut drama full of perfectly-drawn characters and effective suspense, all…
REC 4: Reviewing the Apocalypse
While many of my younger colleagues were eagerly anticipating 2015 as the year of Avengers and Star Wars and Mad Max and Jurassic Park, I will admit I was primarily looking forward to finally getting a chance to watch two other movies. The first was Asghar Farhadi’s About Elly. I consider Farhadi to be among…
Switching on to Reality: Byamba Sakhya’s ‘Remote Control’
A teenager runs away from the drunkenness and poverty of his rural home and moves into the city. It’s not an uncommon story, sadly, but in the hands of Mongolian director Byamba Sakhya, Remote Control becomes both a survival story and an exploration of the line between fantasy and reality. Tsog bivouacs himself on the…
Rupert Goold’s True Story: Another Dead Man Walking
Twenty years ago, Tim Robbins tackled the issue in Dead Man Walking. Ten years ago, it was Bennett Miller in Capote. Now, Rupert Goold has taken it on in True Story. The unifying issue in all three movies concerns the relationship between a murderer and another character who would serve as confessor, advisor, perhaps even…
Reviewing ‘While We’re Young’: Noah Baumbach’s Crimes and Misdemeanors
Sometimes you need a foil. When Gary Fleder’s Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead came out in 1995, I gained a newfound respect for Quentin Tarantino. Fleder and screenwriter Scott Rosenberg were trying to emulate Tarantino, whose Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction had recently exploded on Hollywood and left a ton of fast-talking,…