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…
There’s walking in circles and then there’s walking in circles the Paul Thomas Anderson way. Whatever that means. Not that it matters. Who cares, anyway? A flippant attitude for a flippant movie. Except that Inherent Vice, Anderson’s latest and possibly his worst, is 150 minutes of flippancy, a wacky stumble into safe, though awfully off-putting…
The eponymous academy around which The Atticus Institute revolves, as we are told early on (via ominous letters on the screen, an info-dump technique frequently employed by mockumentary and found footage films), was founded by Dr. Henry West (William Mapother, “I Origins”) in order to study “psi-related phenomena,” such as clairvoyance and telekinesis, until it…
From its first scene of dialogue, older Italian men with permanent scowls etched into their world weary faces mumbling to each other in a Brooklyn bar, Zarra’s Law reads like a mob movie made by someone who wants to imitate the genre but doesn’t speak a word of English. For a significant portion of the…
J. C. Chandor’s New York drama, A Most Violent Year, is a misleadingly titled film, as its timeframe only covers a month and there is very little physical violence. While the title references the exceptionally high crime rate of New York in 1981, the film itself is an intriguing study of different types of violence,…
