January 2012
27 posts
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10 Films Not On My Top 10
In any given year there are bound to be a few critical darlings that you don’t quite agree with, but seemingly never more than this year. So before posting My Favorite Films of 2011, I thought I should acknowledge some movies that won’t be making an appearance on my list. These films have been so critically adored - making appearances on virtually every Top 10 except, well, my own -...
December 2011
21 posts
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My Top 10 Albums of 2011
As you get older, you get more set in your ways and it’s hard to keep up, seek out and absorb new music and much easier to just flip on Pandora (or the radio, if you’re 100), and just go with the flow. Keeping up with your favorites is easy but generally your favorites tend to disappoint just an album or two after they’re anointed with the distinction. Albums by The Strokes and...
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A Separation review
Riding a wave of acclaim from film festivals all across the world and sitting atop countless year end lists, I decided to see “A Separation” as the very last film of 2011. Well acted and competently shot, it was nevertheless not for me so I’ll keep this brief. The film opens with Nader (Peyman Maadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami) applying for a divorce to an unseen Iranian judge....
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Margaret review
Team Margaret. For anyone who hasn’t been following the saga of Kenneth Lonergan’s grief drama’s long road to the screen it goes a little something like this. Lonergan’s debut film as director, “You Can Count On Me,” was a sizable indie hit (helping to launch Mark Ruffalo’s career) so inbetween the occasional writing gig (“Gangs of New York”...
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Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol review
The “Mission: Impossible” franchise has to be one of the most elastic in film history. Unlike James Bond or Harry Potter, the M:I series allows the characters to change in order to fit the vision of the director. The first (and still best entry) was a stylish Brian DePalma action thriller while the second and hardly recognizable installment was a John Woo slo-mo actioneer and worst...
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War Horse review
As someone who grew up with Steven Spielberg—from my worn VHS copy of “E.T” to the life-changing thrill of seeing dinosaurs move in “Jurassic Park”—I’m a little sad its come to this. Based on a novel by Michael Morpurgo, which was itself turned into an Award-winning play, “War Horse” is an opportunity for the filmmaker to settle back into his...
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We Need To Talk About Kevin review
Based on the novel by Lionel Shriver, “We Need To Talk About Kevin” is a chilling but frustratingly black and white portrait of motherhood and raising the ultimate bad seed. The Lynne Ramsay directed film has been on my radar since it made a splash at Cannes over the summer and I had braced myself to be more disturbed than I ultimately was. Tilda Swinton stars as Eva, a travel writer...
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The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo review
Arriving a little over a year after his last film, “The Social Network,” conquered every critics awards (only to be narrowly shut out at the Oscars), and adapted from a series of books that seemingly everyone on the planet has read by now, David Fincher’s “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” arrives with the weight of impossible expectations. It was one of my most...
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The Sitter review
Remember how “Due Date” was like a worse “Planes Trains and Automobiles”? Well “The Sitter” is the lazy, mostly unfunny “Adventures in Babysitting.” And it’s really a shame. While chasing audience approval, former indie-film director David Gordon Green (who whiffed once already this year with the ambitious but inadequate stoner comedy...
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WatchThe Five-Year Engagement (Co-written & Directed by Nicholas Stoller)
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Young Adult review
With only a few features under his belt, Jason Reitman has become something of a surefire awards darling with each film receiving increasing acclaim and raising the filmmaker’s profile. The efforts where he doubled as screenwriter (the adaptations “Thank You For Smoking” and “Up In The Air”) were both good but I felt received a disproportionate amount of praise,...
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“There was nothing in my life that I aspired toward that hasn’t come through for...”
– Woody Allen in “Woody Allen: A Documentary”
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Rampart review
Trust in a filmmaker can go a long way. It can get you into the theatre to see something you wouldn’t have otherwise been interested in, it can make you re-evaluate something you hadn’t thought much of the first time, sometimes even convince you what you’re seeing is probably better than it actually is. Without that trust it can be difficult to tell if a filmmaker is going off...
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Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy review
Never has a film I was so looking forward to made so little of an impression on me. Based on the book by spy-turned-novelist John Le Carre and previously adapted into an acclaimed miniseries starring Alec Guinness, “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” is a spy thriller without the thrills. Set during the Cold War, the film focuses on George Smiley (Gary Oldman) who shortly after retiring from...