Roy Orbison crooning “Pretty Woman” over the opening titles of Todd Strauss-Schulson’s Isn’t It Romantic is just the first of many touches meant to signify how steeped in the world of romantic comedies the film and its world are. In...
It’s nothing but love among Hong Sang-soo fans, but I have noticed at least two factions of sorts crop up in the seven years I’ve been keeping up with his work. The first prizes most his rigidly-structured, more grounded features...
Ciro Guerra made a huge splash with his excellent 2015 film Embrace of the Serpent, a hallucinatory epic of colonial history that was at turns tragic and hilarious, meditative and beautiful. His new film, which he co-directed with Serpent producer...
“Wide shot, long take” has been the default aesthetic for international art house cinema for so long now that its employment – once radical – is now routine. The ease with which a series of auteurs have worn the vitality...
“Locker room talk.” “Stay in your lane.” “When they go low, we go high.” What Men Want, Adam Shankman’s remake of Nancy Meyers’ What Women Want, tosses every sound bite it can scrape out of the last few years into...
Opening with a jocular quote on the screen (Oscar Wilde’s “Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go”) and plucky guitar music before going on to showcase nearly as much blood as it does snow, Hans Petter Moland’s...
Detainment If “Detainment” is any indication, this year’s crop of Oscar nominated short films are going to be a brutal entree of nastiness and despair. “Detainment,” based on the true story of a 1993 case from Liverpool in which a...
A Night at the Garden Short, and sweet? Clocking in at a slim seven minutes, Michael Curry’s documentary is solely composed of archival footage shot at Madison Square Garden on February 20th, 1939. There’s a crowded street. Mounted police officers...
There’s a surprisingly consistent theme across the animated short films nominated this year: The many phases families experience throughout a lifetime. Four out of the five films explore this theme in different ways. Animal Behaviour “Animal Behaviour” is the one...
J.C. Chandor’s All Is Lost, from 2013, is a decent enough movie in its own right but even if it weren’t, if nothing else, it would have given us an easy reference point for the subgenre of solemn survival thrillers....
