Category Archives: Movies

Review: Civil War

Alex Garland’s extrapolation of the current U.S. crisis of cultural division to its most extreme ends is very disturbing not just because of the ultra-violence on display but also due to its purposeful vagueness. The second American civil war is … Continue reading →

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Review: Laapataa Ladies

The Hindi title translates as something like “lost” ladies, though technically speaking the two females in question are misplaced by dint of negligence, a notion that makes this otherwise strained comedy interesting in terms of what it has to say … Continue reading →

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Review: Late Night with the Devil

For their first movie set in the U.S., Australian horror maven-brothers Cameron and Colin Cairnes hit on a novel idea that would seem to require a sensibility they weren’t born to. Late Night with the Devil is essentially a real-time … Continue reading →

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Review: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

Though Tim Burton is an artist in every sense of the word, we tend to approach him as a filmmaker whose work evinces joy because those works are fun to watch. This is the guy whose first feature was a … Continue reading →

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Review: Kinds of Kindness

Kinds of Cruelty would be a more accurate title for Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest movie, but in line with the director’s often skewed view of human foibles and how those foibles can be dramatized, he frames his uniformly unpleasant characters in … Continue reading →

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Review: The Roundup: Punishment

The fourth go-round for this ultra-formulaic police thriller series starring Ma Dong-seok is as predictable as the last two sequels, an m.o. justified by its massive box office returns in South Korea. Once again, burly battering ram police detective Ma … Continue reading →

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Review: High & Low – John Galliano

Several years ago, I read an article in the New York Times that explicated the financial circumstances surrounding the fashion industry. Most designer fashion houses, including quite a few high-end ones, constantly operate in the red, since their product is … Continue reading →

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Review: Songs of Earth

The scenery captured by four expert camera operators—one using a drone—in Margreth Olin’s documentary is undeniably other-wordly, even if the images are meant to convey the magnificence of nature in the raw. The reason has to do with the perceptions … Continue reading →

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Review: Bonnard, Pierre and Marthe

Director Martin Provost is known for his biopics of French women, both real and (semi-)fictional, and his latest extends the idea by studying the artistic evolution of Marthe de Meligny (Cécile de France), a factory worker who, by chance, meets … Continue reading →

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Review: A Human Position

It says a lot about this quiet, enigmatic Norwegian film that the main character, Asta (Amalie Ibsen Jensen), almost casually secures a job as a reporter at her small coastal town’s newspaper without the viewer registering much in the way … Continue reading →

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