The movie wants to be about courage and resilience, but it’s painted in so many broad strokes and tired clichés that it doesn’t quite register on that level.
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Eric Melin
“Wild” breaks the mold of other trip-as-self-discovery films with a refreshing honesty.
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When I was a kid, I loved — and still love — Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits, out now on a fantastic-looking Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection. It offered a wealth of visual delights, a main character I could relate to, a sardonic sense of humor, and it never pandered.
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Both Whiplash and Nightcrawler are models of fast-paced, engaging storytelling that leaves a mark.
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Frank Capra is one of classic cinema’s most famous directors. His movies from the 1930s and 40s epitomized American ideals and attitudes like few other. Two of his best pre-World War II movies are newly available on Blu-ray.
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There are a few hard-nosed, pointed remarks from Hawking—one of the most brilliant minds of the century—and very few truly selfish moments, despite the fact that even as a purely inspirational figure, he’s earned them. The same goes for Jones’ Jane, whose sacrifices just keep piling up. This renders the portrayals, however remarkable the performances are, too saintly and mawkish.
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It’s no news to fans of the young-adult book series by Suzanne Collins that this third movie only covers a portion of her third novel, which is par for the course, I suppose, for a film that contains a both a colon and a hyphen in its title. But even in the Star Wars series, which now retroactively features the word “Episode” in each title, the films themselves had a form of resolution. Sometimes there were cliffhangers, sure, but the emotional journey and theme of each film were wrapped up by film’s end.
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L’avventura is the film that gave Antonioni a name. The film was booed at its first screening at the Cannes Film Festival, but at the second viewing of the film, it was greeted quite enthusiastically, and then finally awarded a Special Jury Prize for “the beauty of its images, and for seeking to create a new film language.”
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In films like 21 Grams, Biutiful, and Babel, he revels in the misery of his characters and then contrives to make them even more miserable. Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of misery and pretentiousness in Birdman (which is subtitled The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) but its mostly psychosomatic—and often played for laughs, which is a new thing for Iñárritu.
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The effortless chemistry of Murray and Lieberher are the main reason that, even at its most clichéd, St. Vincent mostly works.
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What is remarkable about The Vanishing is how, like Gone Girl, it reveals much about its central mystery fairly early on in the film. Unlike Gone Girl, it continues to deepen its characters and maintain a believable sense of dread that plays into its central conceit.
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Buried somewhere beneath the button-pushing gender politics and all-too-convenient plot twists in Gone Girl, there are some mildly interesting points being made about modern marriage. But after two and a half hours of soapy ridiculousness that wouldn’t be out of place on TV’s The Bold and the Beautiful, the movie just seems like cruel and unusual punishment.
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Out now in a new restored 4K digital restoration on Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection, this emotionally raw picture combines minimalistic acting, evocative framing, and unabashed melodrama for a timeless moviegoing experience.
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The problem with Tusk unfortunately is not that its absurd premise can’t make a decent movie, it’s that Smith doesn’t have a screenplay to support more than, let’s say, 30 minutes of screen time.
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Philip Seymour Hoffman anchors this John le Carré adaptation and makes it compelling, even when the film’s rambling tendencies threaten to derail it.
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