Author Archive
SXSW Film Review – Good Night
Good Night opens with a series of houses, one after the other, parading across the screen, one story, two story, neatly manicured lawns and empty driveways. They all share the similarity of having staked in their yard a “For Sale” or “Foreclosure” sign, signaling that…
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SIFF Film Review – Big Joy: The Adventures of James Broughton
Somewhere close to the beginning of Big Joy: The Adventures of James Broughton, James Broughton says that all films are documentaries in that they are all a document of a soul. While I don’t necessarily agree with him, Big Joy is a document of James…
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Film Review – The Hangover Part III
The Hangover shouldn’t have worked as well as it did, but it did mostly because of the chemistry and magnetism of its stars. And it should have been left alone, but the filmmakers, suspecting they’d stumbled upon a winning formula, cooked up The Hangover Part…
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Film Review – Into the Cold: A Journey of the Soul
The film world is saturated with documentaries detailing modern civilization’s adverse affect on the world and its weather. There is An Inconvenient Truth and The 11th Hour, among many others. What separates the best of them from the rest of them is (a) the unique…
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STIFF Film Review – Headcase
The amount of pluck and drive necessary to produce an independent feature is immensely admirable, and so it makes it hard for me to talk about Headcase with the candidness necessary to compose a film review. But here it goes: Headcase is a film whose…
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Film Review – Midnight’s Children
Midnight’s Children, the new film from Deepa Mehta, based on the novel by Salman Rushdie, is a grand and epic story compacted into two and a half hours that paradoxically feels rushed and drawn out at the same time. The novel, an allegory of a…
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An Analysis – The Significance of Family in the Films of Paul Thomas Anderson
There are significant aesthetic and tonal differences throughout all of Paul Thomas Anderson’s films, yet there’s a thematic continuity that is striking. From even his earliest film, Hard Eight, to his most recent, The Master, Anderson’s films tend to explore the nature of family, where…
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Film Review – Renoir
Renoir is well acted and beautifully shot, and it’s rare that this is a detriment to a film, but in Renoir, that’s all there is. The film feels so leaden and clinical. It’s a dull, stately affair. Such is the primary pitfall of biopics. It…
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