Longtime readers of the site are familiar with how often it’s lamented that seemingly no one can get the romantic comedy right. There’s practically a ticker tape parade when someone does, and the most recent wait continues with the confused and sloppy How To Be Single. Billed as Valentine’s Day… Continue reading
No one adapts the minutiae of human interaction better than writer/director Charlie Kaufman. The mundane and feelings of alienation have been constant themes in all of his films, and they once again take center stage in his latest, Anomalisa. Shot completely using stop-motion animation, set in about three locations, and spending… Continue reading
Less is so much more in 45 Years. The film is a quiet, understated, and eventually devastating look at how the past can creep up and affect a seemingly rock solid marriage. It’s all substance with little flash, painting a realistic portrait of a couple being tested by current discoveries jump-started by… Continue reading
Brooklyn is a classic, beautifully shot romance that is one of the season’s true crowd-pleasing features. It doesn’t contain a lot of surprises or stakes, but commands attention with well-drawn, likable characters, a convincing sense of time and place, and a fantastic lead performance from Saoirse Ronan. It’s also a moving… Continue reading
Talk about having time on your hands. The Age of Adaline tells the story of woman eternally stuck at age twenty-nine. This is the kind of “forever young” scenario we all dream about, but Lee Toland Krieger’s film is much more interested in soapy melodrama and period piece costuming than… Continue reading
Fifty Shades of Grey may be the first film in history made specifically for the purposes of hate-watching. Adapted from E.L. James’s unbelievably popular novel (at its height it sold two copies every second), it can be said in absolute terms that whatever lusting and fantasizing readers of the book… Continue reading
Seedy, drug-fueled, and absent any type of sense we’re used to in film, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice is a film destined to divide any audience that watches it. Its core story is fairly straightforward, but twists and turns abound that don’t make a great deal of sense. Anderson seems to… Continue reading
The Theory of Everything is, above all, a marvelous love story. Based upon Jane Hawking’s account of her 30-year marriage to famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, director James Marsh has crafted an emotional, affectionate tribute to the man, love, and life itself. It does get stuck in the biopic genre gears here… Continue reading
The Other Woman plays like a movie that was made by people that actively hate the script. It is a grotesque, shrill, never-ending effort that always finds a way to sink a little lower just when you’re positive there’s no way it can. Not only is it wholly damaging in its… Continue reading
Released in June of 1990 to the tune of $82 million at the box office, Days of Thunder is another high-octane action film from the unstoppable Simpson/Bruckheimer production team that dominated the 80’s and 90’s. Roger Ebert would call it the quintessential example of the “Tom Cruise Picture,” and he’s… Continue reading