Sunday, October 9th, 2011

My Joy

They say one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. But Sergei Loznitsa’s joy is, well, My Joy—even if its own jollity is purely titular. A swinish-looking man, sweat draining down the flaps of his ushanka, smiles nervously as he expounds his philosophy of life—mind-your-own-business non-interference—to a captive audience comprising a solitary, steely-eyed hitcher. Amidst this [...]

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Thursday, September 29th, 2011

The Future

“The fault,” Cassius tells Brutus in Julius Caesar, “is not in our stars, but in ourselves.” Just as the fault is not in the moon, but in himself, when Jason (Hamish Linklater) freezes time in Miranda July’s film The Future, and supplicates the nearest celestial object to let him off the hook. His wife, Sophie [...]

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Thursday, July 21st, 2011

Midnight in Paris

One of the fun things to do when playing critic is envisaging analogues—whether they end up useful to real people, or not. So with The Tree of Life still branching out through my ears, it seemed inevitable for me, in the lamplight of Midnight in Paris, to extend Malick’s branch all the way to Woody [...]

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Thursday, April 7th, 2011

Sucker Punch

The beer in my gut from before I hit Sucker Punch doesn’t preclude me from knowing what the film was about; I only wish it did. The trailer had me fooled that maybe Zack Snyder, directing his own material for the first time, had gone ballistic in a redeemable, wacko-Zacko way. I’ve successfully evaded his [...]

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Thursday, March 17th, 2011

The Adjustment Bureau

The Adjustment Bureau has a rather writerly conception of theology. “The Chairman”—who the movie neither confirms nor denies to be Frank Sinatra—never seems to be satisfied with the most recent draft of Creation, so he’s constantly tweaking it. In order that everything goes to plan, he has agents of the eponymous bureaucracy always on the [...]

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