There’s a good reason to have conflicting emotions about the 1984 film Gremlins. It is a wonderfully entertaining film, but also one that is equal parts adorable, scary and silly. A brief recap, as it has been nearly 30 years since its release: In search of a Christmas present for his grown son, a father […]
Film
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Fifth Estate is One-Fifth Stinky
WikiLeaks film springs a leak in its storyline
When I arrived at the screening for The Fifth Estate, there was a small knot of wild-eyed people hovering around outside, pushing flyers that to convince me that the film is a propagandistic, anti-Assange, WikiLeaks-bashing hack job. I refrained from asking, “have you actually seen the film?” Because: The Fifth Estate is nothing of the […]
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Magical Thinking
Lynn Shelton gets touchy feely
A frequent criticism of mumblecore films is that nothing really happens in them, which has always struck me as a weak line of reasoning. Life doesn’t have a plot (spoiler!) and it’s still pretty interesting most of the time. But Lynn Shelton's new film Touchy Feely tweaks the formula a bit: Nothing really happens, except […]
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Tom Hanks on a Boat
Captain Phillips: A Movie About Tom Hanks on a Boat!
Captain Phillips shouldn’t be as good as it is. It’s a big studio picture, based on an inspirational true story, starring one of the world’s hugest movie stars, directed by a guy most famous for his Bourne movies: Broken into pieces, Captain Phillips should mass-market sap. But it’s the opposite of that: lean and smart […]
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The Fast and the Envious
Rush: A Peek into Ron Howard's Mind
Director Ron Howard’s new biopic Rush—about rival Formula One drivers in the '70s—is good. It’s not great, and it’s not "meh"… it's just solidly “good.” In other words, it's exactly what one would expect from solidly “good” director Ron Howard. However, a closer look makes one suspect that Rush says more about its director than […]
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One Hundred Minutes of Solitude
Gravity: A reminder the universe doesn’t care if you live or die
In the Netflix era, it’s remarkable to be reminded what going to the movies can feel like: dwarfed by bright images on a massive screen, drenched in sound, hearing a collective gasp rush through a crowd of strangers. It is an experience that’s grown increasingly rare: We have grown used to watching things on our […]
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Filmmakers With Impeccable Timing
Documentary about Egyptian metal musicians tells another story
Western heavy metal stormed the Middle East in the late ’80s and early ’90s, gaining popularity with the same crowds it appealed to in the United States and Europe, a subculture of young, perverse devotees. The Egyptian government responded to the genre’s popularity by carrying out a string of infamous mass arrests in 1997, temporarily […]
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Just Friends
Girls, Boys, and Drinking Buddies
Human behavior, when placed under a microscope, is interesting, even if the humans under the microscope are an infuriatingly specific and privileged class of people. Yep, you guessed it—we're talking about mumblecore again. Director Joe Swanberg is best known for Hannah Takes the Stairs and Nights and Weekends. His new film, Drinking Buddies, is about […]
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Girls Gone Wild
Farah Goes Bang flips the script on the male-dominated road trip genre
Few things are as American as the road trip. Trekking across the country inside a rickety old vehicle with only a vague itinerary serving as guide is a time-honored right of passage, and an expression of freedom. Traditionally, however, such exploratory trips have been an expression of male freedom—somehow women were left at home when […]
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From Mozzarella to Camembert
The Family‘s cheesy mob sendup
The lack of originality isn’t The Family‘s biggest offense. Actually, there’s something cheerily familiar about its derivative premise: A mob family is on the run after Dad (Robert De Niro) turns evidence against his fellow gangsters. Their CIA agent (Tommy Lee Jones) has placed them in France—just go with it—where they move from one small […]
