Posts Tagged ‘Film Reviews’

Cold Case

Written by Doug Strassler on March 12, 2013. Posted in Arts & Film, Film

Misery finds plenty of company in ‘The Silence’ The trouble with tragedy is that it is harder than one might think for it to elicit emotion from a third party. Sometimes, an audience remains at a distance despite the harrowing event befalling the characters in front of their eyes. And so it goes with The
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Edward I. Koch: ‘I Don’t Do Cinematography’

Written by Tom Allon on February 6, 2013. Posted in News & Features West Side Spirit, News OTDT, News Our Town, Our Town, Our Town Downtown, West Side Spirit

If Martians landed on our planet and demanded I teach them what a New Yorker is, I’d go no further than show them the hours and hours of videotape of Edward I. Koch jousting at press conferences in the 1980s and defiantly marching across the Brooklyn Bridge during the 1980 transit strike and his more
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Martin Scorcese Makes His Fantasy Biography

Written by Armond White on February 5, 2012. Posted in Film

As a children’s film, Martin Scorsese’s Hugo is overwrought and under thought. Its story of Hugo (Asa Butterfield), an orphaned boy who lives in a Paris train station where he surreptitiously maintains the clock mechanisms, suggests a fantasy autobiography. He wants to think of himself as a child of cinema, always working behind the scenes at the
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Monsters

Written by admin on October 27, 2010. Posted in Arts & Film, Film

By Armond White Monsters is a love story between two shallow, annoying people, Sam (Whitney Able) and Andrew (Scoot McNairy), who resemble Cameron Diaz and Ethan Coen wannabes, the kind of hipsters you see at the Independent Film Awards. They’re stuck in Mexico when an extraterrestrial invasion attacks Earth. Crisis brings out the couple’s foolishness
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Inside Job

Written by admin on October 13, 2010. Posted in Arts & Film, Film

By Armond White For those who missed that unexpected satirical graphics lecture on the current recession that capped Adam McKay’s The Other Guys, Inside Job is the next best thing. With entertaining clarity, writer-director Charles Ferguson explains what caused the recession that began September 15, 2008. Not a comic like McKay, Ferguson seriously chronicles the
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Carlos

Written by admin on October 13, 2010. Posted in Arts & Film, Film

By Armond White Politics don’t matter to directors David Fincher, Steven Soderbergh and Olivier Assayas, whose Carlos, a lavish, gracefully-paced depiction of the terrorist Ilich “Carlos” Ramirez is strangely apolitical, even amoral. It’s part of the new affectless style—derived from hipster cool and leftist guilt that condemns the capitalist West for its culpability in colonialism and
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Life as We Know It

Written by admin on October 6, 2010. Posted in Arts & Film, Film

By Armond White We can’t pretend that anything is more important in film culture than the Internet humiliation-death of Rutgers University student Tyler Clementi taking place the same week as the media hype for The Social Network. After that human tragedy, the media’s celebration of the Facebook movie (a cinematic calamity) shows an alarming disregard
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Let Me In

Written by admin on September 29, 2010. Posted in Arts & Film, Film

By Armond White Let Me In ought to be rated NC-17 due to the problematic nature of its vague concept: Spooky Abby (Chloe Grace Moretz), a child vampire, encourages her wimpy neighbor Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee) to emulate some of her bloodthirsty rage in response to his school bullies. It’s a morbidly grim Afterschool Special. Yet
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The Social Network

Written by admin on September 29, 2010. Posted in Arts & Film, Film

By Armond White The Social Network glamorizes a new paradigm: How the Internet’s basic disconnect characterizes contemporary public discourse. Director David Fincher’s lustrous video images make instant, stylish mythology out of the way Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg re-popularized the Internet by founding the Facebook in 2003. This brainy, insular 19-year-old pinpointed the Internet as a
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The American

Written by admin on September 8, 2010. Posted in Arts & Film, Film

By Armond White For one brief moment, The American becomes a true thriller when George Clooney, playing an enigmatic assassin, stakes out a new assignment in Italy and encounters Filippo Timi (who played the mesmerizing figment of Benito Mussolini in Marco Bellocchio’s Vincere). Here, Timi—the actor of the year—projects another fully imagined life: a wary
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