Movie Review: The Road to Mother (2016)
Not your average bad movie, it’s definitely trying to be good. It’s just not quite there.
Foreign
Movie Review: Your Name. (2016)
The benefit of foreign cinema is that they tend to tell stories that shed a light on their own culture and tell stories a U.S. production would probably warp and bend into something more palatable for our sensibilities, losing that bit of cultural spark that elevated the material in the first place. The drawback is…
Movie Review: Problemski Hotel (2015)
“Heaven. Heaven is a place. A place where nothing, nothing ever happens” — Talking Heads, “Heaven” So, you’ve just been suspended. Suspended in time. In space. A literal suspension that leaves you wandering around everywhere and nowhere all at once. That prolonged feeling we sometimes, sadistically, seek (sick!) when watching a horror flick. True horror…
Movie Review: The Incredible Story of the Stone Boy (2015)
The Incredible Story of the Stone Boy (“La increíble historia del Niño de Piedra”) is an animated film that begins with our main character, a young girl named Marina, nonchalantly talking to a cloud. Yes, you read that right. A cloud. With a face. This cloud then gives Marina (voice of Melissa Gedeón) a ride…
Movie Review: The Salesman (2016)
Emad Etesami (Shahab Hosseini, “About Elly”) and his wife Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti, “The Wedlock”), a childless married couple in their early thirties, are amateur actors playing the lead roles in a local production of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” a play in which a good man’s virtue turns to hypocrisy and his marriage crumbles….
Movie Review: Elle (2016)
Paul Verhoeven is back with more scratchy sexual politics, darkly comic innuendos, and harshly nasty violence. First things first, the most joyous part of that sentence is the beginning. Paul Verhoeven is back. Not back to Hollywood, of course, which he left nearly 17 years ago after the dismal response to his schlocky invisibility thriller…
Movie Review: Neruda (2016)
“I am convinced there will be mutual understanding among human beings . . . in spite of all the suffering, the blood, the broken glass” — Pablo Neruda, Memoirs If the genre known as bio-pic has evolved into a predictable linear account of a well-known person’s life, Chilean director Pablo Larraín (“Jackie”) has turned the…