What a squandered opportunity for director Greg Mottola to churn out a generically noisy suburban spy spoof in the toothless comedy caper Keeping Up with the Joneses. Woefully strained and exhaustive, Mottola’s off-kilter espionage bag of cheap chuckles barely manages to scrape off a scattered selection of smirks here and there. It never takes full…
Historical and even scientific truth can be merely the consensus agreed upon by those who presently have the power and influence to determine public opinion, or it can be based on evidence that has been tested in the laboratory, in debate, or in a court of law. Written by David Hare and based on the…
Occupied village. Crying babies. Mothers many. Babies doze. Japanese colony. Korean village. Woman leaves. Baby stays. Both cry. Off goes. Jap’s house. The opening scene of Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden leaves no room for blinking. That is the secret of its hypnotic pace swimmingly swinging from a contemplative eye which leaves it all to a…
It’s an uncomfortably heavy 13-minute stretch that Konrad Tho Fiedler fills in Running Eagle to tell the brief, though highly evocative tale of a young Native American woman (Devery Jacobs, “Rhymes for Young Ghouls”) struggling to get back home across a frozen wasteland after fleeing a life of forced prostitution. The narrative is split between…
Part family drama, part mystery, part slapstick comedy, and part mad-scientist movie, Men & Chicken is one of the most bizarre and original films I’ve seen. Writer and director Anders Thomas Jensen combines all those elements like a mad-scientist himself, conjuring up an absurd story full of grotesque characters, and translates it on-screen in an…
Films centering around the American military generally fall into two camps: Pro-war and anti-war. The U.S. military will always be a subject of extremely dichotomized opinions and, as such, films revolving around a soldier will generate polarizing reactions depending on its approach and on an individual’s personal beliefs. Where Birthday lies between these opposing sides…
Writer-director Barry Jenkins (“Medicine for Melancholy”) delves into a power-driven coming-of-age drama detailing the tremendous angst-ridden existence of an impoverished Miami-based gay black youth struggling with self-identity and self-worth in the unflinching and revealing drama Moonlight. Convincingly raw and roughly poignant, Moonlight pushes some psychologically and emotionally charged buttons in a gritty and unforgettable narrative…
