Censor is a film that works on multiple levels. It is an enveloping and chilling horror that both disturbs and shocks. It is a meticulous period piece that creates a sense of the past while also treating the politics and attitudes of that period with a sharp satirical edge. It is a brilliantly designed, shot…
There are sometimes actors that embody a word so perfectly, they might as well be the textbook example of it. But when it comes to Bill Nighy, he straddles two particular words — elegant and odd. Even in his bolder roles (e.g., the aging rocker Billy Mack in “Love Actually”) Nighy never loses his poise,…
Onward, the latest animated adventure from the studio that seemingly can do no wrong, Pixar, kinda does. It is a mediocre effort overall, but still a further reminder of the studio’s status as a master heartstring-tugger. In the end, that’s where the studio excels and the way Dan Scanlon, Jason Headley and Keith Bunin’s story…
For the most part, hard luck familial dramas have the potential for being notoriously manipulative on an emotional scale. However, when done remarkably well — with the right precision of pathos and truth — such melodramas can resonate and overcome their soapy constraints. Director/co-writer Jake Scott (“Welcome to the Rileys”) oversees such a one with…
Lives online, lives offline. Activities that only happen because web cameras connect us to an anonymous multitude. What happens online may stay online, or overlap with the “real world.” What happens when a person is one thing on the Internet and another in the outside world? The questions around such alternative lives are pressing concerns…
Video game movies have sucked for decades, so when a kind of good one comes along, it arrives with the benefit of basement-dwelling expectations. This could be the explanation for why Roar Uthaug’s lean, lithe reboot Tomb Raider is so clearly silly and yet strangely satisfying at the same time. Or perhaps the movie works…
In the film, Sweet Country, set in the bleak Northern Territory of Australia of the 1920s, there is a brief interchange between a hard-working, though weary and aging Archie (Gibson John), an Aboriginal cattle hand, and a wayward teenage Aboriginal Philomac (played by the twins, Tremayne and Trevan Doolan). Archie lectures the boy about their…
