“Argo” comes along at the perfect time – depending on what your interests are. The film, which opens with a tense sequence recreating the storming of the U.S. embassy in Tehran by Iranian militants, is timely due to the similarities between the events it depicts and similar events on our actual world stage. Both the…
Considering how deeply “Seven Psychopaths” embraces its meta-ness, it only makes sense to begin this review by comparing it to other movies. Of course, it follows a trend begun by “Pulp Fiction” of violent, funny movies that comment on their own bloodshed. Specifically, it addresses the cyclical nature of violence and consequences – much like…
“Butter” was shot several years ago, but the film’s distributors waited until this election season to release it. It was a seemingly shrewd choice – the film, which portrays a fierce competition among candidates for the Iowa state butter-carving championship, functions as a political allegory, complete with sex scandals, race baiting, and dirty tricks. But…
Hollywood has always been known as a bastion of liberalism, but after the relative success of “Obama 2016”, the anti-Obama documentary that made a surprising $32 million at the box office (making it the 4th highest-grossing documentary ever), people have begun to wonder if things will change. Maybe Hollywood will see that there is an…
The time-travel movie is a genre unto itself, and in order to satisfy the fan base, each one must address a very specific set of paradoxes. What happens if you meet your future self? When you change the past, how do you experience that in the present? Of course, in the end the biggest question…
“The Master” opens on a shot of the marbled blue-white wake of a battleship, and director Paul Thomas Anderson returns to that image several times throughout the film. Soon, it becomes clear why; the image embodies the film’s subject, the muddled and mysterious history that we leave behind us, specifically the history of one sailor…
Richard Gere has built a long career out of playing a very specific type of role: men who are successful and corrupted by power but with enough latent virtue to be worth rooting for (see “Pretty Woman,” “Chicago,” “Primal Fear” for examples). “Arbitrage,” the muddled new thriller from first-time writer/director Nicholas Jarecki, gets the first…
I hate to criticize movies. That may seem like an odd statement coming from someone who writes a blog built on film criticism, but it stems from personal experience. I spent a few years in my mid-twenties making independent films. On one of them, I was the writer, director, editor, producer, and lead actor. In…
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