It can be really hard to boil an entire movie down to a one line summary. How do you possibly pack all of the nuance and depth assuredly contained in a film into a brief sentence? Most of the time, these summaries plastered across IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes are simplistic and fail to adequately describe a film. They are often little more than a description of a major plot point, which…
The Masters of Suspense is a comedy farce attempting to talk about writers and their sources of inspiration. Exploring the tensions between reality, fiction and ego, it sprints along at a brisk 100 minutes, respecting your time. While it is funny moment to moment, this brevity is to the film’s benefit…
A man enters the frame, swallowed by the world that quietly oppresses him with impossible decisions as he tries to hold back tears and make sense of what it is to be an adult filled with regret and uncertainty. He yearns for a more fulfilling life, but we are often incapable of escaping the bonds that we willfully…
We’re all familiar with the Infinite Monkey Theorem, yes? Well, the Infinite Monkey Theorem states that a monkey hitting random keys over an infinite amount of time will at some point type out a famed work. Makes sense, right? Well, Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 is what happens when the monkeys fail at typing Hamlet.
Golf prodigy and incurable hayseed Augie (Jeremy Sumpter) is just hanging around his small Southern town, playing cross-country golf and throwing coins on porches, when a flashy professional gambler known only as Riverboat (Christopher McDonald) wanders into his life. Riverboat sizes Augie up and senses a fine hustling opportunity. With the help of his lady friend Jessie (Katherine LaNasa) and a stack of hundred dollar bills, Riverboat convinces Augie to ….
Ruben Östlund has the ability to create a realistic scenario and let it play out organically to explore the behaviors that emerge when people are presented with an uncomfortable or unusual event. Rather than using the tricks of filmmaking and storytelling to fabricate hyperrealistic drama, he strips an event down to its basest elements to craft something that more closely approximates a real human experience. In Incident by a Bank he uses a bank robbery to explore the …
No longer the wunderkind or enfant terrible who wrote and directed his first feature film, Kicking and Screaming (not to be confused with the Will Ferrell vehicle), at the relatively tender age of 26, Noah Baumbach, now in his mid-forties, has turned his critical filmmaker’s eye to the inherent struggle or conflict between generations, one slipping into, if not always accepting, compromise and disappointment, the other, embracing the seemingly endless personal and …
I’ve never been able to get into skiing. Despite growing up in the tundra known as Upstate New York, having more than a passing familiarity with a white landscape, and constantly being barraged by accusatory exclamations of “you don’t ski,” I just haven’t taken to those vehicles of death. There is…
We all have our own thing. That singular hobby or obsession that is ours. There is a deep love that accompanies the time spent with that outlet. Be it music, movies, cars, food, or whatever else you have that allows you to open, it is the one place where you are fully you. There are…
There are a lot of different types of film, like any art form. If you like everything you see, or conversely hate everything, you probably aren’t allowing yourself to be fully open to what is out there. Art can be made for many reasons, but for me, it is at its most effective when it is trying…