You and I both know the truth. You just don't admit it.
Masculinity, tortured and wounded, is clearly the meat on which Nicolas Winding Refn likes to gnaw, but he’s salivating over the subject a little too ridiculously with his latest feature, the violent revenge drama Only God Forgives. That intriguing title never lives up to its grand potential, as Refn approaches his theme of choice with…
They developed a unique romantic arc with just a single “sunrise” and a single “sunset” together on screen, but Ethan Hawke’s Jesse and Julie Delpy’s Celine have never been more melodiously moving than at “midnight.” This third entry in the beautifully aging series marks the most tender and touching time in the cinematically enabled lives…
A deft touch turns into a heavy hand in Derek Cianfrance’s big, bruised follow-up to his quietly brilliant masterwork “Blue Valentine.” His latest is a conflicted drama about fathers and sons and fate and bad decisions and maybe even ice cream. The Place Beyond the Pines is an admirably ambitious project that clobbers its themes…
If sci-fi movies have taught us anything, it’s that aliens tend to paint their allegiances in black and white. There’s no middle ground between the amiable charm of “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” and the acid-spewing nastiness of the vicious xenomorphs that terrorize the humans in “Alien.” Occupying each end of the spectrum, aliens tend to be…
The tough guy renaissance is already drying up. The revival of macho 80s stars in action vehicles specifically designed to emulate the look and feel of the violent flicks these guys made a couple decades ago was never for everyone, but for a brief while, it was most certainly for me. Seeing Sylvester Stallone, Dolph…
Cinematic sentimental gestures don’t come much more desperately inspirational than the slow motion shot of a person reaching skyward with a swelling score accompanying their ascent. In his syrupy drama The Impossible, director J.A. Bayona reserves this moment for the third act, but it’s not like the sentimentality sneaks up on us. This kind of…
A cinematic peek behind the curtain of the raid that ended with Osama Bin Laden’s assassination in May 2011 is certainly an intriguing hook for a movie, but it’s far from the whole story that unfolds in Kathryn Bigelow’s tense, taut thriller Zero Dark Thirty. Achieving intimacy in this gigantic narrative about a decade-long manhunt…
