It’s always fun in cinema and television to watch obscenely rich and out-of-touch people lose all of their money and then have to live like us normals. It’s a huge reason why shows like “Arrested Development” and “Schitt’s Creek” were so popular from the jump. But the reasons why shows like that had staying power […]
Tin Pan Theater
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Gigantic
Colossal is the Citizen Kane of Monster Movies
Don’t read this review. Sorry, I don’t mean to tell you what to do, but one of the true joys of cinema I have had this year was watching “Colossal” without knowing anything about it. As the plot continued to escalate and become darker and entirely unpredictable, I realized I was watching one of the […]
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Over the Garden Wall
“Swiss Army Man” unfolds expertly
“Swiss Army Man” came out of the Sundance Film Festival amid multiple walkouts, critically derided as Daniel Radcliffe’s farting corpse movie. I am happy to report that is EXACTLY what the movie is (among about two dozen other things) and it earns every second of its scatologically-obsessed running time. There are poops, farts, boners, masturbation […]
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Hearts of Darkness
“Embrace of the Serpent” is a jungle trip worth taking
There is a lot to unpack after the first viewing of “Embrace of the Serpent.” It is at first glance a Columbian adventure/thriller/drama that unfolds like Werner Herzog, Francis Ford Coppola and Terrence Malick teamed up to make the ultimate travelogue. As the film sits longer, however, the character work and thematic depth take the […]
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Killer Instincts
The Assassin asks for nothing less than complete submission
Upon first viewing, The Assassin can almost be impenetrable. There is court intrigue, hidden motivations, honor taking precedence over logic, and, of course, graceful and gravity-defying wirework. Basically, all the things that make a wuxia martial arts movie great. But Director Hsiao-Hsien Hou and cinematographer Ping Bin Lee are not interested in telling a plot-driven, […]
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Pollinating Ríos Vivos
Art and activist collectives raise awareness of dam impacts
Though Oregon is many thousands of miles away from Colombia, there are some common struggles. Namely, the impact of dams on indigenous and other communities who can no longer use the rivers in traditional ways. The Ríos Vivos Movement, a social movement of communities impacted by hydro-electric dams in Colombia, is joining forces with The […]
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Infinite Wallace
The End of the Tour quietly explodes
I picked up David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest because I was supposed to. Seventeen years old, a senior in high school and desperate to not look as uncool as I felt, I knew that this was the book I was supposed to carry around in order to look hip (or at least intelligent). I carried […]
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West of Eden
Slow West and the possibilities of the western
In the final frames of Slow West, the camera pauses over the bodies of all the characters that have died. In quick, static shots, the audience is reminded of every corpse—those of major characters and incidental figures alike—that contributed to the movie’s body count. That tally is substantial: Slow West is a story of guns […]
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Attn: Clothes Nerds!
Hey, look, it’s a movie about clothes
Director Frédéric Tcheng is carving out a niche. With 2008’s Valentino: The Last Emperor, 2011’s Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel, and now Dior and I, Tcheng’s work in film has been exclusively devoted to documenting characters and moments in the world of high fashion. (True, Valentino was directed by Matt Tyrnauer—but given his […]
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Hipster-sploitation
While We’re Young cuts both ways
God bless Greta Gerwig, and not just for her own terrific gifts. Greenberg, her first personal and professional collaboration with director Noah Baumbach, proved to be a fantastic match, most notably in how her loopy carbonation as a performer seemed to shake the filmmaker from an increasingly caustic, none-more-bleak path. (I firmly believe Baumbach’s Margot […]