With each successive movie, Andy and Lana Wachowski prove that their imagination is practically unrivalled in Hollywood and that their awesome ability to bring that imagination to lush, limitless life puts them in the company of cinema’s greatest modern magicians. So it seems only fair that when the sibling team takes on the space opera…
It’s just mean to dangle an actor like Rutger Hauer in front of a fan of dark movies only to snatch him away mere minutes after the play button is pressed. With top billing and a front and center picture on the movie poster, Hauer tempts you into Real Playing Game as ailing elderly millionaire…
The problem with wisdom, we are told by a voiceover the moment Poker Night begins, is that you only get it after you need it. Hindsight, similarly, is like looking into a rear view mirror, unable to see what you’re going through until you’ve already passed it. Now that we know how important those words…
There is a subgenre within American independent cinema of rural Americana, films that depict a section of American society that exists between the familiar towering cityscapes of New York and Los Angeles and the empty expanse of the Western. Rather than being set in wild or agricultural areas, films like “Winter’s Bone,” “Frozen River” and…
The tragic decay of a brilliant woman’s mind is given a gentle, poignant examination in Still Alice, a deeply moving and beautifully minimalized drama that sweetly takes the high road and finds in its protagonist’s struggle room for love and courage. Adapted from the novel by Lisa Genova and directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash…
By their nature, submarine movies lend themselves to easy criticism — in terms of wordplay that is. Analogies such as “the performances were so painfully lacking that they ‘sunk’ the entire film” or “why watch this film when it should be isolated and submerged beneath two miles of ocean?” could easily take form. Luckily enough…
Photography, both still and moving, is given a refreshing challenge in Wei Hu’s cleverly original short Butter Lamp, which concerns itself with a professional photographer’s efforts to take pictures of Tibetan nomads against a wide range of evocative backdrops. The entire movie uses the same camera setup with cuts between each group’s photo session. So…
