Drama Rated NR
"The characters remain faces on a brochure."
Drama Rated PG
Children of Heaven, from Iranian director Majid Majidi, immerses us so thoroughly in the world of its child protagonists that their central dilemma – trading a single pair of shoes back and forth so that their parents don’t realize they’ve lost their only other pair – has a powerhouse dramatic intensity. When they meet mid-day
Drama Rated R
“…most interesting for Tatum’s performance and the way director Steven Soderbergh emphasizes an overall air of economic desperation.
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is a movie of vastness and stillness, of epic landscapes and inner permutations of the heart. The wonder comes in watching those varied things work in concert. The first frame has such compositional beauty that it’s clear you’re in the hands of a master. Turkish writer-director Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Drama Rated PG-13
Why is my first instinct to defend Forrest Gump rather than sing its deserved praise? Released in the year of Pulp Fiction and in the midst of the American culture wars, the movie became a symbol for folks on all sides. What it became less of, with each successive argument, was a movie. That’s too
"Marling underplays her character’s charisma to the point of nonexistence."
How thoroughly does Joan Crawford own Grand Hotel? She makes Greta Garbo superfluous. A star parade (and Best Picture winner), Grand Hotel unfairly encourages such comparisons. Crawford and Garbo are joined by the likes of John Barrymore, Wallace Beery and Lionel Barrymore as various residents of a luxury hotel in Berlin. As a diva ballerina,
Robert Bresson once again uses the intensely physical to explore the deeply philosophical. In the case of Pickpocket, the act of lifting a wallet from a man’s jacket is a means to consider what the act of thievery swipes from the thief’s soul. Why do we steal? Is theft always wrong? Can those who break
Should the fact that Young Adult ends almost exactly where it begins be considered a fault or a form of narrative integrity? Considering the movie seems to think it’s really taken us somewhere – the story is framed as a journey – I’d argue the former. Charlize Theron gives an open-wound performance as Mavis Gary,
"…a post-Katrina fairy tale made from real mud."
