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Film Reviews
Film Review – Blockers
Blockers (2018) is the kind of sex comedy that does what many good sex comedies do. It’s starts off with a premise that adheres to lowbrow antics – high school kids discovering their blossoming sexuality – and then handles it in a mature, insightful manner.…
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Film Review – Outside In
I am always excited when a new Lynn Shelton movie comes out. My first exposure to her work was in 2011 with Your Sister’s Sister, and I was really pleased by its humor and kindness. (I am reminded by writing that sentence that I need…
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Film Review – Ready Player One
The road that brought Ready Player One (2018) to the big screen was a circular one. We start with Steven Spielberg, the most successful director in cinema history. His work, from Jaws (1975), E.T. (1982), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), and Jurassic Park (1994)…
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Film Review – Isle of Dogs
Wes Anderson has one of the most unique visual styles of any filmmaker. His compositions are almost always perfectly symmetrical. The camera is often placed at eye level, with his subjects either facing straight toward us, or perpendicular to the right or left. His sets…
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SXSW Film Review – The World Before Your Feet
When I visited New York City, it was a definite culture shock. I was just a kid growing up in a small town in Washington State. To me, Seattle was considered a “big city.” Nothing could have prepared me for the magnitude that was “The…
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Film Review – Pacific Rim: Uprising
What to say of Pacific Rim: Uprising, the big, dumb sequel to Guillermo del Toro‘s big, dumb robots vs. monsters spectacle of 2013? (I know the original has its defenders and I find his output, in general, worth a watch but ultimately discarded Rim as a feast…
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Film Review – Unsane
In Steven Soderbergh’s new film, Unsane, Sawyer Valentini is a young, bright woman on an upward swing as a bank analyst in a new city. Her job is “to interpret data to produce analytical results,” and she is soon recognized for her work. Soon, however,…
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SXSW Film Review – On Her Shoulders
On Her Shoulders has an important figure and issue to discuss but fails completely to get that across. Nadia Murad is a twenty-three year old Yazidi from Iraq whose village was taken over by ISIS, resulting in most of the men being killed including those…
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