Last Days in the Desert
★★★ 3/4 A much-needed sense of humility permeates Rodrigo Garcia’s Last Days in the Desert, a respite from the disingenuous self-importance found in most bombastic biblical epics and [...]
Reviews
Elephant
★★★★ 4/4 How does a filmmaker, pace Godard, go about making sense of an incomprehensible tragedy? What should be his or her approach? On the one extreme, we have countless examples of [...]
The Friends of Eddie Coyle
★★★½ 3.5/4 I’m wondering how many synonyms for the word “seedy” I’ll need to get through this review. Probably aren’t enough in the English language. If ever there’s been a film [...]
Christine
★★★★ 4/4 If Robert Bresson had ever made a film about drugs, it would likely have been as stark and austere as Christine, a 52-minute masterpiece created by Alan Clarke for BBC television. [...]
Breaker Morant
★★★ 3/4 Part staid courtroom procedural, part trenchant exploration into the justifications of wartime brutality, Bruce Beresford’s 1980 drama Breaker Morant forgoes the usual [...]
The Stanford Prison Experiment
★★ 2/4 I’m surprised in the trouble I’ve had separating Kyle Alvarez’s film about Philip Zimbardo’s 1971 college student pseudo-prison experiment from the questionable [...]
The Sealed Soil
★★★★ 4/4 Although poet-filmmaker Forough Farrokhzad and her landmark documentary short from 1962, The House Is Black, which helped pave the way for the Iranian new wave of the sixties and [...]
Crimson Peak
★★ 2/4 Edith Cushing lays it bare early on in Crimson Peak: “It’s not a ghost story—it’s more a story with ghosts in it. The ghosts are a metaphor for the past.” Does that mean all [...]
Yearning
★★★★ 4/4 At one point during the remarkable train sequence late in the film—this elliptically poetic episode runs approximately nine minutes, considerably longer than what I had [...]
The Big Short
★★★ 3/4 Perhaps the most outré of this year’s crop of outrage cinema, Adam McKay’s The Big Short turns economic catastrophe into bitter farce, at times hilarious in its excesses, at others [...]
Film The Madman 