Soheil Rezayazdi is a communications director at an education and human rights nonprofit headquartered in New York City. He spends much of his free time with cinema.
For a long time, Elliott Smith was just another guy. He traipsed around Portland, his home of many years and the central location of Heaven Adores You, like any other face about town. He did drywall jobs to pay rent and played in a grunge band at small dive bars. He put out records that did OK in his own city. He was a regional …
Sometimes life hits you with a bunch of complicated shit when all you really want to do is spin a Neil Young record and roll another number. Inherent Vice is a film about that feeling. It’s about other things, too: capitalism, counterculture, California. It’s also about how much Paul Thomas Anderson, the film’s director …
Last Hijack (2014) Director: Tommy Pallotta, Femke Wolting Country: Netherlands | Germany | Ireland |…
Two Shots Fired opens on an act of irrational violence: A 16-year-old boy, devoid of any expression or motivation we can register, shoots himself twice after a quick swim. The film ends, 100 minutes later, having fully convinced us that it’s no more logical than that impulsive act. Two Shots Fired operates just beyond our understanding, which befits a film about human…
Goodbye to Language is a crazy quilt of the obsessions of Jean-Luc Godard. War imagery collides with domestic hostility collides with footage of the filmmaker’s dog. The scenes change like channels on some spastic, possessed television. For many, the film may play like unwatchable chaos – all noise and no signal. Getting on its wavelength requires a certain level of masochism. You…
Mankind plays by a different set of rules at night. For most of us, the daylight hours are defined by work, routine, and the pursuit of a paycheck. The nighttime offers something far more alluring: the chance to pursue our own, more radical ideas. In Night Moves, characters toil on an organic farm and collect towels at a health spa during …
As a 15-year-old, I’d never heard the word “pastiche.” Still, I understood that urge: to create your own version of the things you loved. If you grew up on action movies, maybe you tried to make one as a teenager. My own attempts never went well. I lacked the technical skills to translate my ideas into something that looked and felt like the real thing. But even if I did have some virtuoso knack for crafting action spectacles in my parents’ backyard, I still had nothing to say. I just wanted to imitate the films that enchanted me. There was no goal, no purpose, but artful recreation.
“I do things all the time for no reason.” Of all the lines mumbled or screamed by the teenagers of Palo Alto, this one feels the most like a statement of purpose. The sentiment fits just about everyone we meet in the film. Characters stagger from one destructive moment to the next with little in the way of logic. Palo Alto, at its best, sits back and lets them experiment, fail, and learn.
A young family moves into a nice, quiet home. What can go wrong, besides everything? Such is the premise of untold horror movies, and now The Canal. An Irish import ../../css/r tropes_ from jump scares to witless gore. It also gives horror fiends an entirely competent __8212_2fixsxqcu3vcprn8c00gjs.css; if pretty uninspired — latest fix.
The first thing you’ll likely notice about Venus in Fur, the new stage-to-screen adaptation from Roman Polanski, is the extraordinary physical resemblance between the film’s lead actor and its director. Mathieu Amalric makes for an absolute dead ringer of Polanski, who turned 80 last year. The casting may seem at first like a cute joke…