It might be tempting to spend the night with The Man from U.N.C.L.E.—it’s attractive, stylish and has a great soundtrack—but the experience won’t satisfy you. This slapdash movie throws its scrambled narrative into your lap and expects you to do all of the work to figure it out. Neither director Guy Ritchie nor cowriter Lionel Wigram […]
The Vaudevillian Heroes of Silent Film
One of cinema’s most enduring and iconic images is Harold Lloyd, donning his trademark boater and circular spectacles, hanging precariously from a clock face above bustling streets below. In this timely snapshot we can see the silent era’s greatest strengths: absurdity, comedy and physicality. While trying dramas such as Birth of a Nation (1915), Sunrise (1927) and The […]
The Freedom of Movement in Chris Marker’s La Jetée
Movies as we know them are a trick. They do not technically depict motion, but rather a series individual images shown in succession. Chris Marker evokes this idea as he tells the story of La Jetée (1962) through a series of still frames. By almost entirely removing motion from his film, Marker challenges the idea that cinema is […]
Jurassic World
Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park was a cultural phenomenon. It remains an impressive movie that has captured the imagination of every child and adult, dinosaur-obsessed or not. While its sequel, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, didn’t manage to captivate audiences like its predecessor did, it remained an entertaining dinosaur-themed diversion. (Jurassic Park III, on the other hand, does not exist.) So when Universal Studios […]
Debating Avengers: Age of Ultron with The Waffle Press
Diego Crespo of The Waffle Press is a stalwart defender of Age of Ultron, a film he believes qualifies as one of the best and most thematically rich MCU films released thus far. I, on the other hand, found Joss Whedon’s Avengers follow-up utterly hollow, terribly confusing and altogether disappointing. Diego invited me onto his show to discuss […]
It Follows
It Follows taught me to fear everything onscreen. The film’s visual language elicits constant unease and feeds off our growing existential dread. The movie takes you in and traps you, leaving you addicted to its inescapable paranoia. The film opens with an unassuming shot of a suburban street in early autumn. Birds chirp and all seems […]
Stark Contrast: Episode 10 “Mother’s Mercy”
Season 5 of Game of Thrones concludes with “Mother’s Mercy,” a crowded episode that delivers in some ways while squandering potential in others. In our discussion, J talks about how the television Game of Thrones universe seems to not only tolerate but reward evil. We then both commend and debate Cersei’s (Lena Headey/Rebecca Van Cleave) walk of shame. I […]
Child 44
Cigar chain-smoker and all-around war hero Winston Churchill once mused, “Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” While Child 44 isn’t quite that indecipherable, Churchill’s sentiments perfectly summarise the disjointed and fragmented adaptation of Tom Rob Smith’s U.S.S.R.-based novel. Director Daniel Espinosa fails to utilise the superb cinematic tools at hand—including […]
Hannibal Review: “Primavera”
If last week’s “Antipasto” was the appetizer for Season 3 of Hannibal, “Primavera” is the first course. The two episodes complement each other in many ways, the most obvious being that the first focused entirely on Hannibal (Mads Mikkelsen) while the second shifts its attention back to Will (Hugh Dancy). Hannibal’s melancholic longing for Will danced around […]
Stark Contrast: Episode 9 “The Dance of Dragons”
Game of Thrones follows up one of its best episodes with one of its strangest. Nothing in “The Dance of Dragons” is weird in and of itself, but this week offered a shift in characterization for Stannis and his co-cast members that didn’t seem congruous with the rest of Season 5. Meanwhile Arya’s tenure with the […]
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