Thanks to Madman Entertainment, ccpopculture has 3 DVDs of Nightcrawler to give away. “Nightcrawler is a pulse-pounding thriller set in the nocturnal underbelly of contemporary Los Angeles. In his Golden Globe-nominated performance, Jake Gyllenhaal is Lou Bloom, a driven young man desperate for work who discovers the high-speed world of L.A. crime journalism. Finding a…
As its title suggests, Dear White People is a statement as much as a film, tackling modern-day race relations. Justin Simien’s debut feature stages its satirical drama in Winchester University, a fictional American college where residential colleges are divided – and, ultimately, fractured – along race lines. Early on I fretted that its insistence on…
Towards the end of Noah Baumbach’s latest film, While We’re Young, protagonist Josh (Ben Stiller) laments the feeling of being a “child imitating an adult.” It’s a familiar, facile observation. It’s the kind of thing that people say when their life is absent real concerns – about money, illness or the like – and they’re…
Living is Easy with Eyes Closed resembles an old Polaroid of the Andalusian seaside, yellowed by the summer sun and age alike. Despite its title – cribbed from “Strawberry Fields Forever” –it cuts through any nostalgic haze to present a clear-eyed portrait of 1966 Spain, its beauty and its injustice. The story told is an…
Samba (Omar Sy) and Alice (Charlotte Gainsbourg) are two people on the edge. Samba, an illegal immigrant whose spent the past decade in France, lives with the perpetual threat of deportation, while Alice, his caseworker, lives with a mental illness that recently culminated in a breakdown which put her career in jeopardy. Each of them…
Xavier Dolan’s fifth film, Mommy – released when the director was only twenty-five – is certainly his most mature work of an already outstanding filmography. An intimate portrait of the tenuous triangle formed between Die (Anne Dorval), her ADHD son, Steve (Antoine-Olivier Pilon) and her neighbour – and would-be lover – Kyla (Suzanne Clément), it’s…
Consuming the pop culture output of a country helps to develop an understanding of that country. Case in point: the United Kingdom. Despite my very English background (three quarters of my grandparents and my father were born there), I’ve never visited old Britannia, yet my familiarity with British television and movies has engendered a sense…
x+y demonstrates that a documentarian’s skills don’t always translate into the world of fiction films. Director Morgan Matthews has been making documentaries since 2002, but this film is his first foray into fictional features. x+y takes inspiration from his 2007 film, Beautiful Young Minds, telling the story of Nathan, an autistic, talented teenage mathematician (Asa…
Insurgent, the first sequel of the dystopian young adult series that began with last year’s Divergent, hasn’t exactly been welcomed with open arms by the critical community. It’s currently sitting at 31% on Rotten Tomatoes, with widespread accusations that it’s little more than a cut-rate Hunger Games clone. I’m not entirely convinced by that argument,…
It’s an empirical fact that Cowboy Bebop is one of the greatest anime series ever made. It’s also an empirical fact that one of its greatest episodes has essentially nothing to do with the show’s emphasis on its protagonists’ futile attempts to escape their dark pasts, nor of its core of existential loneliness: I’m speaking,…
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