We’ve been there before. We’ve all been there before. The giant, threatening spaceships hovering silently over major cities. The natural and unnatural disasters. The body-snatching, Earth-obsessed aliens. The teen heroine – insecure at first, indomitable by the end – whose inner and outer journey audiences implicitly and explicitly…
There are obvious flaws with Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups. Many people have, and will continue to look negatively upon this film. What they forget, though, is that this film isn’t targeted towards a broad audience - Knight of Cups is reserved for the narrow category among people, general public and cinephiles alike…
As a result of Michael Bay’s reputation, if the world expected something out of 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, it was tone deaf jingoistic carnage making dumb action setpieces out of a tragedy. And it’s hard to blame the world, because after all, it’s equally hard to believe that the man who helmed Pearl Harbor and…
Irrational Man (Sony Home Entertainment), directed by Woody Allen, is set on the campus of Braylin College in Rhode Island. Abe Lucas (Joaquin Phoenix) is a philosophy professor whose arrival creates a stir among both faculty and student body because of Lucas’ notorious reputation for heavy drinking and womanizing. He soon…
In a single word, Miguel Gomes’ 6+ hours Arabian Nights Trilogy is disappointing. Featuring three separate films, distant in content but similar in theme, Gomes crafts, at times, quite a commendable series. Yet, for trilogy of its length, Gomes’ work only treads water on the themes it presents to the audience, and doesn’t care to…
Bad movies happen. It’s an inevitability like the sun rising or Christmas decorations showing up before Thanksgiving. I used to get annoyed when I ended up seeing a mediocre to bad film. Unless you are meticulously curating…
Raging Bull, Martin Scorsese’s greatest film, shows that an audience can hate a character almost from the word go and still be compelled by their story enough to keep watching to the end of the film and then watch the film again and again. The fact that it still stands as one of the greatest films of all time, and the best film of the…
It is often said that Barry Lyndon is an atypical film for Stanley Kubrick, but that is not the case. The film is very typical when considering his overarching theme of dehumanization and the ills of society. Kubrick tells his story with distance, as per his usual, but he still captures the essence of the character and the story laid out in…
Adam McKay has spent quite a while crafting a certain kind of cinematic expectation. The guy makes dumb movies. Well, let me correct slightly, he makes movies that focus on dumb people. His partnership with Will Ferrell has led to the type of films that get celebrated in dorm rooms around two in the morning. McKay knows his audience and more importantly he knows how to entertain them. Despite his cinematic output, I never…
Tim Burton was certainly an imaginative director back when he first started working in features. Kicking off his feature career with Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (which also kick-started Paul Reubens’ screen career and helped launch his TV show Pee-Wee’s Playhouse), an odd but entertaining film about a man-child whose…