Category: Reviews
Living on the Edge: ‘The Last Patrol’ Offers a Sobering Post-War Trip
It’s hard to call Sebastian Junger’s compelling new documentary, The Last Patrol (2014), an anti-war film … or, for that matter, a pro-war movie. That’s in part because this picture, which kicked off the American Museum of Natural History’s Margaret Mead Film Festival Thursday night, is too textured to peg in a specific hole. The…
Flight of Fancy: ‘Birdman’ Worth Taking Off With, Despite Flaws
Virtuoso filmmaking by Alejandro González Iñárritu. A bravura, Oscar-worthy performance by Michael Keaton. Innovative, feels-like-one-take cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki. You’d think that with all those ingredients, Birdman, or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) would be an instant masterpiece, pushing director Iñárritu into a very select group of celluloid heroes. Indeed, there are moments in the…
Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash: The Darkness of Artistic Ambition
2014 still has a couple more months to go and some big, well-regarded movies are soon to be released. They will have to go a long way to surpass Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash, which is head and shoulders above anything that has been widely released thus far. Of all its outstanding qualities, this is what makes…
Brian Yuzna’s Society: Satirical Body Horror at its Best
Embracing the issue of class-consciousness with aplomb, and thankfully devoid of contemporary horror’s current preoccupation with CGI, Society (1989) is not only a divine slice of body horror, but also a fascinating polemic on the social mores of Reaganite America. Billy (Billy Warlock) is a basketball jock, festooned with an obligatory mullet, who despite enjoying…
Thrillers Reviewed: ‘A Walk Among the Tombstones’ and ‘Septimo’
I really like Scott Frank. The writer of such sharp screenplays as Get Shorty (1995), Dead Again (1991), and Minority Report (2002), Frank has worked steadily in recent years on some popular movies, but has sadly not written anything I have been interested in for a long time now. And I really like Liam Neeson.…