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Review: New Year’s Eve (2011)
Just because 2011 was a great movie year doesn’t mean it didn’t have its fair share of dreck. A favorite (so to speak) of mine was Jim Sheridan’s Dream House, a film so stupid and needlessly convoluted...
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Review: Take Shelter (2011)
The opening sequence of Jeff Nichols’s Take Shelter is the first of many nightmares protagonist Curtis LaForche (Michael Shannon) will have over the course of the movie. That it is a dream isn’t...
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Review: Rage (2010)
Rage, the title card that opens Christopher R. Witherspoon’s thriller informs us, is a “violent, uncontrollable anger.” The bright red title card, though, gives way to a series of an apparently calm...
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Review: Bullhead (2011)
The best thing about Bullhead (Rundskop), Michael R. Roskam’s feature-length debut, is by far its lead actor, Matthias Schoenaerts. Schoenaerts, playing cattle farmer and small-time crook Jacky...
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Review: The Hunger Games (2012)
Watching Gary Ross’s The Hunger Games, I found myself wishing, quite possibly for the first time in my life, that a movie were darker and grittier. I am by no means a fan of the “nolanization” of...
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Dispatches from the Paris Korean Film Festival: War of the Arrows (2011)
Kim Han-min’s War of the Arrows begins the way you would expect a film with that title to begin, i.e., with a battle. The opening sequence shows the fall of a castle in 17th-century Korea, in what...
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Dispatches from the Paris Korean Film Festival: The Taste of Money (2012)
With The Taste of Money, Im Sang-soo continues the portrait of South Korea’s ultra rich he started with his 2010 remake of The Housemaid. Designed like a spiritual successor to his previous film (one...
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The best films of 2012
This has been a weird year, movie-wise, for a number of reasons. Reason number one, of course, is that I live in France, and not in America, where the past couple months have seen the release of more...
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Review: Spring Breakers (2012)
Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers tries very hard to make you believe it is a really dumb movie. This is a film, after all, whose opening sequence looks like one of those late-night Girls Gone Wild...
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Review: Fast & Furious 6 (2013)
There’s a moment in Fast & Furious 6, that featured heavily in the trailers, where Dom (Vin Diesel) jumps off the roof of a moving car to save (ex-)girlfriend Letty (Michelle Rodriguez),...
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Pacific Rim and the modern blockbuster
Warning: The following contains some minor spoilers for Pacific Rim, Star Trek Into Darkness, and Iron Man 3 (if you count a very oblique reference a spoiler). Over the past couple weeks I’ve had what...
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Review: Elysium (2013)
Four years ago, Neill Blomkamp scored an unexpected hit with his first feature, the science fiction/action film District 9. Carried by a manic performance by breakout star Sharlto Copley, the movie...
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Review: Snowpiercer (2013)
A blockbuster production with a devilishly unpredictable plot. This is how, towards the end of the movie, a character describes the events of Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer, in a brazen moment of meta...
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The best films of 2013
The above title is misleading. It’s something I mention every year, but it bears repeating nonetheless: the above title is misleading. It implies objectivity when in fact there is nothing more...
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Better Late Than Never: The Best Movies of 2014
So, it’s been a while. So long, in fact, that if you scroll down just a little, you’ll see that my previous post on this here site was my list of the best movies of 2013 (and that one wasn’t three...
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