LiC’s review of Anne Fonataine’s French romantic comedy/drama ‘The Girl From Monaco’ starring Fabrice Luchini, Roschdy Zem and Louise Bourgoin.
Filed under: Reviews | 1 Comment »
LiC reviews the terrific documentary Branson from last week’s Los Angeles Film Festival. You won’t believe me when I tell you that the stories of a bunch of people on the lower rungs of the entertainment industry in tourist mecca Branson Missouri are good ones, but it’s true.
Filed under: Film Festivals, Reviews, Trailers | 7 Comments »
Los Angeles Film Festival review of the world premiere of Wah Do Dem.
Filed under: Film Festivals, Reviews | No Comments »
Los Angeles Film Festival review of the UK comedy In The Loop starring Peter Capaldi, James Gandolfini and Mimi Kennedy
Filed under: Film Festivals, Reviews | 3 Comments »
Los Angeles film festival review of Matthew Bissonette’s comedy Passenger Side starring Adam Scott and Joel Bissonette
Filed under: Film Festivals, Reviews | 6 Comments »
Los Angeles Film Festival review of Alicia Scherson’s Turistas
Filed under: Film Festivals, Reviews | 5 Comments »
In Francis Ford Coppola’s latest, Vincent Gallo and newcomer Alden Ehrenreich play two estranged brothers in a creative family of Italians torn apart by tragedy and by a domineering father (Klaus Maria Brandauer). Tetro the elder brother has retreated to Argentina where he carries on a Bohemian lifestyle but seems to be squandering his talent as a writer. When his younger brother Bennie shows up to reconnect, old family tensions are brought to the surface and family secrets are brought to light.
Filed under: Reviews | 5 Comments »
Plenty has been made of the fact that Duncan Jones is David Bowie’s son. Those who think they live in an orderly, connected universe look to Bowie’s Space Oddity or his Ziggy Stardust phase or his starring role in The Man Who Fell to Earth as possible sources of inspiration. That’s not only unfair to [...]
Filed under: Reviews | 8 Comments »
Youssou N’Dour (Photo credit: Hugo Berkeley)
There’s a great story to be told about the making of and the reaction to Senegalese popular singer Youssou N’Dour’s religiously themed 2004 album Egypt. Unfortunately, filmmaker Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi only brushes against her subject and the result works best as a performance film rather than as an enlightening message [...]
Filed under: Reviews, Trailers | 5 Comments »
Captain Kirk’s nipples! We got killed at the box office.
Make no mistake: Land of the Lost is stupid.
Stupid awesome.
If you’re tired of Will Ferrell’s persona, particularly his “dumb guy who thinks he’s a smart guy” character – or if you never liked it to begin with – then the 92 minutes you spend here (assuming [...]
Filed under: Reviews, Trailers | 17 Comments »
Successfully amplifying their low-wattage, TV-grade charms to the big screen, John Krasinski (The Office) and Maya Rudolph (Saturday Night Live) almost manage to save Sam Mendes’ latest film from himself. Though they ultimately fail, one at least looks forward to seeing more of them on the big screen. Mr. Mendes on the other hand has [...]
Filed under: Reviews | 10 Comments »
Like the aging douche bag frat boys at which it’s aimed, The Hangover comes on with a lot of testosterone and R-rated swagger promising something dangerous, subversive and funny. Sadly, a few shots of Jägermeister and a couple of laughs later, it’s exposed as just another balless example of its type. It makes a mildly [...]
Filed under: Reviews | 10 Comments »
Tenzin Zopa searches for the Unmistaken Child
When Tibetan Buddhist master Geshe Lama Konchog died in 2001 at the age of 84, it fell to his humble disciple, Tenzin Zopa, to search for his reincarnation. Armed with only a few clues gleaned from rituals performed after his master’s passing, from astrological readings and through the interpretation [...]
Filed under: Reviews | 5 Comments »
Yolande Moreau as Séraphine
Séraphine Louis, AKA Séraphine de Senlis was an uneducated washerwoman and housekeeper who was guided by voices to paint. Scorned by those around her, her vibrant, abstracted and dreamily expressive florals were discovered by Avant-garde art critic and collector Wilhelm Uhde when she was hired to clean his residence in 1913. Encouraged [...]
Filed under: Reviews | 9 Comments »
For the last 15 years, Pixar has carved out a niche making old-fashioned entertainments that appeal to audiences of all ages without pandering to any one of them. More impressively, they’ve done it using the highest level of craft and without repeating an obvious formula. In nine films they’ve told nine different stories with eight [...]
Filed under: Reviews | 8 Comments »
“I feel the world is forgetting about us. By being a video
reporter, at least I can show that Burma is still here.”
- The leader of the Democratic Voice of Burma, known as ‘Joshua’
In 2007, Danish filmmaker Anders Østergaard set out to make a short documentary about one of the members of the Democratic Voice of [...]
Filed under: Reviews | 4 Comments »
Masahiro Motoki and Tsutomu Yamazaki in Departures
Yojiro Takita’s Departures, Japan’s Oscar winner for best foreign language film, is a likable enough story rooted in some fascinating raw material, but it is marred by ham handed voiceover, exaggerated sentimentality, odd jags of black humor and sappy montages that would feel at home in a CD commercial [...]
Filed under: Reviews | 5 Comments »
“If they wanted you to be yourself, they wouldn’t be paying you.”
- Sasha Grey in Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience
Steven Soderbergh’s latest film opens with a standard-issue, upwardly mobile couple on a date. There is a cab-ride discussion of the movie they’ve just seen and this carries over to an expensive dinner at an upscale [...]
Filed under: Reviews | 6 Comments »
I guess they were out of cherry Slurpees
Hey. Want to be dry humped by McG for a couple of hours? Have I got the movie for you.
I remember walking out of The Terminator 25 years ago buzzing about how cool it was. I’d never seen a villain quite like the indestructible cyborg that looked a [...]
Filed under: Reviews | 22 Comments »
The Brothers Bloom isn’t just a movie about a con. It is itself a confidence trick. The difference is that the marks are all sitting in the audience instead of on the screen.
Deploying his now trademarked abundance of style and excess of patter, writer/director Rian Johnson (Brick) tries for two hours to distract the audience [...]
Filed under: Reviews | 14 Comments »
Summer Hours opens with an image of a French country house. It flickers as if summoned from memory, but then it comes to life with the sounds of playing children. From there, even as the film’s credits roll, we’re dropped into the middle of the chaos of a celebration and we’re left to find our [...]
Filed under: Reviews | 7 Comments »
As directed by J.J. Abrams (Mission: Impossible III, TV’s Lost), the new Star Trek is a solid if unspectacular reboot of the beloved space franchise. It moves briskly and entertains with plenty of humor and action while all the actors do a nice job of making familiar characters their own. Unfortunately, it’s saddled with a [...]
Filed under: Reviews | 35 Comments »
Isaach de Bankolé in The Limits of Control
Those who like their movies with a strong dose of plot are sure to be irritated by the latest film from Jim Jarmusch. Carefully structured but willfully lacking anything beyond the slimmest of narratives, The Limits of Control is more concerned with setting a mood and ruminating on [...]
Filed under: Reviews | 12 Comments »
Russell Crowe and Ben Affleck in State of Play
Condensed from the well-regarded 2003 BBC miniseries of the same name, Kevin (Last King of Scotland) MacDonald’s State of Play is a competent if unspectacular thriller in the journo-politico mold. While it never achieves the heights of genre classics like All the President’s Men, it manages to [...]
Filed under: Reviews | 8 Comments »
Not your ordinary high-speed chase.
The simple, neorealist tropes of this latest film from Oscar-winning Iranian director Majid Majidi (Children of Heaven) will be instantly recognizable to anyone who makes a habit of watching foreign films. The familiarity is almost off-putting at first, but the film sticks with you days after you see it. Though it [...]
Filed under: Reviews | 10 Comments »
Julie Gayet and Michaël Cohen ask themselves: Shall We Kiss?
The romantic comedy Shall We Kiss? is the kind of sparkling frivolity that seems to be the unique province of the French. The American counterpart would be heavy on gags and light on charm with a third act denouement that has the hero and heroine finding [...]
Filed under: Reviews | 4 Comments »
English artist Steve McQueen’s first feature, Hunger, is an uncompromising, grim and intense piece of work that probes the 66 day hunger strike led by Bobby Sands to restore the political status of members of the IRA being held at The Maze prison in Northern Ireland in 1981.
Largely eschewing the highly charged politics behind the [...]
Filed under: Reviews | 7 Comments »
Student Academy Award winner Cary Joji Fukunaga’s debut feature: Sin Nombre
[Ed. Please welcome back Mr. Sam Kressner with another feature review.]
A thriller travelogue about illegal Central American emigration, first-time director Cary Joji Fukunaga’s “Sin Nombre” captures the intersecting lives of two teenagers, Willy and Sayra.
Questioning his gangly allegiance, Willy is a product of macho-obfuscation and [...]
Filed under: Reviews | 7 Comments »
Kyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata: A new recruit in Japan’s army of unemployed
What happens in the clamped down cubicle world of a Japanese businessman and father when his job is outsourced to China with its cheaper labor? That’s the dilemma facing family man Ryuhei Sasaki. Laid off from his administrative position, he’s not only robbed of [...]
Filed under: Reviews | 10 Comments »
Malin Akerman and Patrick Wilson get their leather-and-latex-in-prison fetish on
Among a significant segment of the comic reading crowd, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen is a little like holy scripture. From an artwork standpoint, it’s a highly cinematic piece with its colored panels unfolding in storyboard-like fashion, but it also brings to bear the power [...]
Filed under: Reviews | 40 Comments »
