Author Archive
Film Review – Legend
Janus the two-faced Roman God. The Taoist yin and yang. Nickelodeon’s CatDog. The human struggle has long been envisioned in terms of opposing-yet-intertwined forces. In Legend, writer-director Brian Helgeland’s dialectic envisions Tom Hardy as both sides of humanity’s conflicted co-dependence with itself. Tom Hardy –…
READ MOREFilm Review – Lost Soul
“I realised that I had to repeat this idiotic formula; and then began the insanest ceremony. The voice in the dark began intoning a mad litany, line by line, and I and the rest to repeat it… ‘His is the House of Pain. ‘His is…
READ MOREFilm Review – The Wolfpack
The Wolfpack presents a story you’ve heard before: awkward teenagers binge-watch movies. Heck, you probably live that story yourself, and I suspect that much interest in the film (this reviewer’s included) stems from the instant empathy film fans are likely to feel with its cinematically-obsessive…
READ MOREFilm Review – Mr. Holmes
“The man beyond the myth.” So asserts the promising, nonsensical tagline of Mr. Holmes, starring Ian McKellen as Sherlock in his twilight years. A more humane approach to the world’s most famous detective sounds fresh, but Sherlock Holmes is so popular in part because he is…
READ MOREFilm Review – The Look of Silence
Director Joshua Oppenheimer said he set out to fail* in making The Look of Silence – but in failing, to discover something important about how that failure happened.
READ MOREFilm Review – The Tribe
Pimpin’ ain’t easy at a Ukrainian school for the deaf, for the students or the audience. The Tribe, from director Miroslav Slaboshpitsky, plays as an effective experiment in how cinema communicates, with all dialogue in Ukrainian sign language, an expressive cast, and no onscreen subtitles.…
READ MOREFilm Review – The Falling
Illness is other people. Or rather, sickness is a social contagion as well as a physiological one. Today, fainting at a dramatically opportune time is the stuff of hacky sitcom humor. In Victorian England, it was gendered hysterical through the trope of the elegant socialite…
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