DVD / Bluray
-
Lost, Season One: Strangers On A Plane (Not Rated)
More than ten years since it began and more than five years since it ended, I have begun a grand revisitation of Lost. When I first began the show, I had just married and was still in school. I wasn’t much of a reader during my first encounter. I understood that many of the characters […]
-
Jupiter Ascending: Descent to Some Kind of Love (PG-13)
Conjure, if you will, a moving image of the hippest rollerblader you’ve ever seen. If you are strapped for stock images, try the reuniting-the-team segment at the front end of D2: The Mighty Ducks, or some other nineties vintage of the same ilk. Now, hoist that rollerblader twenty, thirty, a thousand feet into air—the same […]
-
In Bruges (R)
Early in Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges, Ken (Brendan Gleeson) and Ray (Colin Farrell), two Irish hitmen, are standing in a museum, contemplating a painting of the Last Judgment. Ray describes purgatory as “the in-betweeny one – you weren’t really shit, but you weren’t all that great either” – but the humor of the description belies […]
-
The Importance of Being Poppy : Happy-Go-Lucky (R)
The opening scene of Mike Leigh’s shamefully overlooked Happy-Go-Lucky (2008) is a master class in establishing a character. Poppy, one of the great female characters in cinema, is introduced riding her bike. Her course is a wobbly wheeled delight, she’s dressed eccentrically and smiles frequently, but what is most noticeable is her full-eyed wonder, her […]
-
Rich Hill: A Look at Poverty Before It was a Statistic (Not Rated)
Before the collapse of industrial empires like Detroit, there was rural America. And rural poverty has been forgotten for much longer than the most excessive architectural subjects of ruin pornography have existed. Andrew Droz Palmero and Tracy Droz Targos’s Sundance documentary, Rich Hill, is a reminder of a whole culture that is rarely found in […]
-
Song of the Sea (PG)
Come away, O human child To the waters and the wild With a fairy, hand in hand For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand. This quote from Yeats fittingly opens Tomm Moore’s Song of the Sea, which seeks to understand a world full of weeping through the eyes of a human […]
-
Chantal Akerman’s News From Home (Not Rated)
I write this on a train, returning home after four days in New York City. In the last five years, I have toured three high school classes through the Metropolitan, the Cloisters, and the smaller museums of Manhattan, like the Morgan and the Frick. While El Greco and Fra Angelico’s Adoration scenes are true and […]
-
What Kind Of A Man Are You? (R)
Speaking of his wife and her brawny boss who is over for dinner, small town barber Ed Crane looks at the two flirting in his kitchen and remarks dryly to us, “I guess Doris liked all that he-man stuff. Sometimes I had the feeling that she and Big Dave were a lot closer than they […]
-
Full of Rag Water and Bitters: Blue Ruin (R)
You’re full of rag water and bitters and blue ruin and you spill out -Tom Waits, 9th & Hennepin The star-crossed lovers are dead when the movie begins.There was a story of love, adultery and murder left aside. There were years of trauma skipped over, the dissolution of one family and the rallying and recovery of […]
-
Defect & Exile: The Hunt For Red October (PG)
I revisited The Hunt For Red October recently and found it a far different film than I remembered. I saw this one in the theater when I was nine and revisited it more than a dozen times in my teens, though I had not seen it in a decade when I started it a few nights ago. […]
-
Where the Wild Things Are: Put Off All Your Beast (PG)
“Inside all of us is a Wild Thing,” goes the tagline to Spike Jonze’s 2009 film Where the Wild Things Are, based on the popular children’s book by Maurice Sendak and Max is the wildest of the wild, son and younger brother in a broken family. Jonze with co-adapter Dave Eggers craft a touching film […]
-
Children of Men: Rachel Weeping In The 21st Century (R)
A little less than a decade back, the greatest Christmas movie of all time came and went with disappointingly little fanfare— I say “disappointingly little” despite the fact two dozen top American film critics put it in their top ten lists at the end of the year. A few of their reviews dabbled in the […]
-
Ride Like Lightning, Crash Like Thunder: The Place Beyond the Pines (R)
“He’s my son and I should be around him. I wasn’t around my dad and look at the… way I turned out.” The film opens with the speaker, Luke Glanton (Ryan Gosling), shirtless and bedecked with a tattoo scheme in which White Chocolate likely served as inspiration. He paces about a small utility room twirling and […]
-
Dumb And Dumber: Angel Beasts In The House Of Mirth (PG-13)
Let me start by getting myself into a little trouble. I think the best comedy is offensive. I think comedy is, by definition, a kind of offense. Occasionally, people say to me, “I know of this really funny comedian. He’s not dirty at all. Very clean, but very funny.” I have yet to find this […]
-
Barefoot in Church: Ragamuffin (PG-13)
Most Christians who grew up in the 90s or before know Rich Mullins as the musician who wrote “Awesome God,” but his life was much darker than his most popular song would suggest. Mullins was an ascetic, even a rebel. He trashed phone booths and drank and went barefoot in church. He may have even smoked […]
-
A Simple Plan (R)
“The finest trick of the devil is to persuade you that he does not exist,” writes Baudelaire. It is the greatest trick of modernity, beginning with the Enlightenment, as well. And, if the various modern social projects from capitalism to communism had anything in common, it was their motivation to convince all of us that […]
-
Ace in the Hole (Not Rated)
When Chuck Tatum rolls into Albuquerque, his busted car is being towed to a mechanic, but he is nonetheless behind the wheel, casually reading a newspaper. A bemused, smug expression Tatum wears suggests he is enjoying the ride. I could get used to this. Something is broken, but that brokenness has made his life a little […]
-
The Mosquito Coast: The Origins of Totalitarianism (PG)
Quite a few more people have seen Peter Weir’s Witness than his The Mosquito Coast. Perhaps, this is because watching a movie about the charms of tradition is easier than watching one about the terrors of modernity. But both are messages that we need to hear. After all, being wise as a serpent is as much an injunction as being innocent as a dove.
-
12 Angry Men (Not Rated)
Abraham Lincoln once said, “Mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice.” The opening shot of 12 Angry Men lingers on an inscription that reads, “Administration of justice is the firmest pillar of good.” This would seem to imply Men is a story primarily about justice. In fact, it is about mercy, or rather, that peculiarly American […]
-
Belle (PG)
It is a truth universally acknowledged that Jane Austen-era dramas attract large and devoted audiences. Add to the mix a real-life heroine who is the daughter of a British aristocrat and African slave, and the potential for tear-jerking, romantic moments grows exponentially. If only Belle, directed by Ghanaian Amma Asante, had a clever script or […]