The opening montage of dance clubs and riding motorcycles throughout the Japanese countryside flow along with an eerily tranquil score, letting audiences know from the onset that Ittetsu Nemoto is no singularly-defined monk. Filmmaker Lana Wilson and cinematographer Emily Topper (“After Tiller”) have teamed up with editor David Teague (“Life, Animated”) to explore one man’s…
As a kid, watching “Tom and Jerry” was must-see TV. Observing that poor blue cat getting outsmarted by a tiny brown mouse (episode after episode after episode) never — incredibly — got old. I always knew Jerry was going to get the last laugh, no matter how close Tom got to beating him. Cat and…
In junior high school, my good friend Sara would show me “fast-forward” versions of films — she would sit me down and show me her favorite movies, speeding through the parts that were too drawn-out and inconsequential, with the purpose of getting to the good stuff faster. The Forest, the first mainstream horror movie of…
I will approach this review a little differently if you don’t mind. But allow me first to tell you a little story. I made an irrational choice. I started my review for Irrational Man before I even saw the movie. Irrational indeed. I started this review before I even knew whether this movie was going…
Unfriended is the kind of movie that I already can’t wait to watch again in ten years. Better yet–I’d love to watch teenagers ten years from now watch it and see if it makes any sense to them. This is to say, Unfriended is a movie that is violently in the moment, a unique and…
Realizing that she can no longer play the roles she played when she was twenty, the now forty-year-old European actress Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche, “Godzilla”) faces the consequences of the passage of time. Nominated for a Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2014, Olivier Assayas’ (“Something in the Air”) Clouds of Sils Maria explores the life…
Granted we’ve all enjoyed our fair share of them, but it is still a nice change of pace to watch a Hollywood film that isn’t one of those big budget, high-stakes films with product placements, massive CGI explosions and recycled plots. Tommy Lee Jones’ The Homesman is a tour-de-force western on the opposite side of…
