[caption id="attachment_25027" align="aligncenter" width="624"] Common and John Legend perform Oscar winning song "Glory"[/caption] Last night should have felt terrible, at least for me. I saw the filmmakers behind two of my favorite nominees, Boyhood and…
These are my ten favorite films of the year. They do not constitute a "Best of 2013" list, but rather represent the films I found most satisfying, provocative, and ambitious. Looking at my top films…
Grade: D- It’s sometimes difficult to tell if Jobs, the much-ballyhooed and long-delayed biography of the late co-founder of Apple Computers, is one of the year’s worst movies so far, or a biopic so fearlessly…
Grade: B+ It would be a little too easy to write off Crystal Fairy, Sébastien Silva’s third film, as a slight and unimpressionable assembly of countless tired indie tropes. From the American youth thirsting for…
Grade: C+ The To Do List is a frustrating viewing experience, though not because it is a particularly bad film. On the contrary, it is a frequently hilarious and fitfully interesting teen sex comedy that…
Grade: B+ I might be one of the least qualified people on the planet to review a movie like Much Ado About Nothing. I’d be at pains to muster a single unique thought on any…
Grade: B This year already, we have seen more than our share of movies exploring the vacuous and compensatory nature of excess in our lives. Works like The Great Gatsby and Spring Breakers, for example,…
Grade: B- World War Z, an adaptation of the Max Brooks novel, is the kind of movie that you see once in theaters, you enjoy it, and then you go on with your life. Perhaps…
Grade: C+ Why does Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby feel like two distinct movies, clashing with each other more often than complementing each other? Why is it that lengthy stretches of dialogue, despite being lifted…
Grade: A- Middle of Nowhere is a film that we don't see enough of in mainstream cinema. And I'm not only talking about a narrative that centers on a woman of color, that was written…
Grade: B+ Lincoln has the potential of going down as one of the great anomalies in Steven Spielberg's career. While the marketing surrounding this abbreviated adaptation of Doris Kearn Goodwin’s Team of Rivals would have…
I'm taking this week's Quick Takes as an opportunity to correct some of my major blind spots, all by directors with new releases this fall. In Bruges Grade B | 1st Viewing The first feature film…
Grade: B- Perhaps I am underestimating the appeal of esoteric works like Spanking the Monkey or I Heart Huckabees, but I feel now more than ever that the career trajectory of David O. Russell, one…
Grade: B+ It is pretty satisfying, and perhaps even fitting, that one of the better movies I have seen at the Twin Cities Film Fest so far should be a quintessentially Minnesotan production. Finding Home,…
Grace: C One of my least favorite aspects to movie writing is going to a festival and being forced to review something I simply did not like very much. This is particularly true for smaller…
Grade: C+ Quartet, the directorial debut from Dustin Hoffman, is likely to draw considerable comparison to John Madden’s The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, and not merely because they both happen to star a dour Maggie…
Grade: B The festival darling and awards contender Argo is about as close as political thrillers get to becoming a thoroughly engaging entertainment, while not quite managing to fully thrill or provoke me outright. The…
Grade: A To inspire even the most disillusioned among us. To show us our history. To startle us with remembering, or with seeing for the first time, the way things were less than thirty years…
Grade: B+ There are several words fitting to describe Michael Haneke's films, between shocking, disturbing, cynical, demented, prying, trying, and the occasional statement of beautiful. But of all the thing Haneke is, it would be…