I enjoy Lars von Trier chiefly because he knows how to be experimental with film. He is audacious yet it is with the intent to tell a story, to be metaphorical versus sheer visceral. So yes, his images bend toward novelty, but it is in the larger, grander composition of conveying a meaningful symbol […]

  I have a hard time making this film out. It feels confused which I think is the intention of the filmmaker. But it also feels discombobulated, trying too hard to be sophisticated. It is supposed to be a story, but nothing actually happens. We’re just given pieces of one person’s memory, and that memory […]

  I found this film by Sophia Coppola to be much more enjoyable than my first experience with her, with the acclaimed Lost in Translation. In The Virgin Suicides, we have the examination of the shackling of female sexuality, and at the very least the expressivity of what this means to blossoming young women. It […]

  This is a splendid meditation on aging, if not mortality. What makes it sweet versus morbid is in the ability to find comedy in this natural fact of life: we age. And when we age, we look back in hindsight at the years in which we never considered death a reality, or at least […]

  It is always wonderful to see a genius like Christopher Nolan make filmmaking so effortless. It is even more splendid to see his genius blossom, while maintaining the humanely impossible ability to tell a complex blockbuster-esque story while revealing the transcendent at the same time. His talent is an envious one for any aspiring […]

  What are the defining features of a man that are important to be educated to the soon-to-be? How to Be a Man attempts to comically answer the question by providing a farcical journey of an over-the-hill comedian. The scenario which prompts the entire movie is borderline weak, nevertheless, the main character is very funny. […]

  This is a film a grown up Tarantino would make. A more mature Quentin who would have been bored by now for childish violent imagery while still retaining the quasi-comic book feeling of a parallel universe that exists in the underbelly of our everyday society. A more mature version of Tarantino would be overtly […]

  Drinking Buddies frankly surprised me. And it’s my fault for not understanding who the filmmaker was to begin with. If I had known I would have been more acquainted with the guerrilla cinematography which provides a more sophisticated gonzo portrait of the intimate spacing between people’s friendships and relationships. I also would not have […]

  In following from last week’s Short Term 12 review, whereby there was a focus on the fact that broken individuals exist because of improper educational nutrition, The Master concerns itself with a passive grandiose identity if not megalomaniac who believes he can rid the world of evil, starting with a broken soul by the […]

War. What is it good for? The rhetorical question is stereotypically created when a film concerns itself with the Vietnam conflict which escalated into a war. Yet with Good Morning Vietnam we see not a guilt complex that holds the hand of the stereotype which seeks in its effort to humanize people mutilating themselves while […]