Category: Reviews
Truth and Moviemaking: Why Jon Stewart’s ‘Rosewater’ Doesn’t Work
A compelling story doesn’t necessarily make for a compelling movie. Such is the case with Rosewater (2014), Jon Stewart’s tedious, heavy-handed film documenting the harrowing detainment and torture of a Newsweek journalist during the tumult surrounding the Iranian presidential elections in 2009. The picture, based on a true story detailed in a book by Maziar…
Reviewing ‘Foxcatcher’: Bennett Miller Does It The Old Fashioned Way
Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher does not feel like a 2014 movie. The drama chronicling the bizarre relationship that developed between the enormously wealthy and enigmatic John du Pont and a pair of world champion wrestlers, Dave and Mark Schultz, feels much more like a throwback to the late ‘60s/early ‘70s, when films moved at a slower…
Film Review: How ‘Laggies’ Loses Focus
I like Sam Rockwell. I really do. I would watch Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and Moon over the better-known Adaptation and 2001 any day. And no one has ever played a fodder crewmember better than Rockwell did in Galaxy Quest. But his character Craig is not a realistic panacea for Keira Knightley’s Megan in…
More Sleaze, if You Please: ‘Nightcrawler’ Takes TV to Task
Satire has got to be one of the hardest things to do right – especially when it comes to films about the TV industry. They can either be ferocious and telling, as Network (1976) is, or dismal and ludicrous, which is how To Die For (1995) turned out. The world of television is such an…
The Babadook: The Finest Australian Horror Film Ever Made?
Let’s get this out of the way right now – The Babadook is almost certainly the finest Australian horror film I’ve ever seen. First time feature film director, Jennifer Kent, has created a devastating vision of a single-mother, haunted by the death of her husband, in what may or may not be a state of…