Mistress America is Noah Baumbach’s second feature for 2015, and by far the strongest. His first effort, While We’re Young, parlayed an unconvincing generational-gap comedy into a weirdly-shoehorned meditation on authenticity in documentaries; Mistress America, thankfully, proves to be both a funnier comedy and a more insightful analysis of the blurred line between artificiality and…
If we’re lucky, we begin our lives in a community of warmth and acceptance, a family where our status as loved goes unquestioned. But as we age into adolescence, that haven is inevitably breached by doubt and distrust, as we begin to question our position in the world. Those questions are exacerbated when you’re an…
The Intern has a charming premise, charming direction and charming leads; in fact, the whole thing is pretty charming. Writer-director Nancy Meyers has shed the rom-com trappings of her previous films (The Holiday, It’s Complicated) to produce a considered tale that entertains while negotiating sexism and ageism in the workplace. The film benefits from terrific…
Watch Macbeth if you like your Shakespeare slick and relentlessly bleak. Michael Fassbender gives an awards-worthy clinic as the flawed, tortured king. But a word of warning: this story is not for everyone; and I recommend doing your homework. I’ve never studied ‘The Scottish Play’ and I found the language equal parts beautiful and frustrating…
Trust Denis Villeneuve to take what could have been a fairly conventional drug war thriller and transform it into a hollowed-out horror movie. His latest film, Sicario is, at its core, a scathing indictment of modern American patriarchy. He pulled a similar trick with 2013’s underrated Prisoners, realising an unapologetically pulpy script as a deeply…
I’ve done a lot of travelling in my time. There was a lot of dancing, more music than I could shake a glowstick at, and enough glorious (at the time) experiences that there’s definite “nostalgia” (cringeworthy recollections) to be “remembered fondly” (blatantly denied). We Are Your Friends captures all of that and then some. At its heart,…
This movie is good. Like, really, non-cliché, good. I’d rewatched the previous, Timothy-Olyphant-starring Hitman film in preparation for this one. I’d enjoyed it. It wasn’t a cinematic masterpiece, but still an enjoyable film. After watching Hitman: Agent 47 however, it simply pales in comparison. Agent 47’s action sequences are superb, and the stunts leave you…
You’d need a heart of stone to grow up in the ‘90s and come out without some environmentalist tendencies. You’d go to the movies and watch as cute rainforest animals had their home imperilled by oncoming bulldozers (in Fern Gully: The Last Rainforest) or cringe at the cruelty inflicted upon an innocent orca (in Free…
Whether or not you’re familiar with the life story of Brian Wilson, Beach Boys leader and troubled genius, Love & Mercy’s story will be a familiar one. How that story is told distinguishes is what the film from a raft of interchangeable musician biopics. Its potentially conventional rise-fall structure is softened by splitting the narrative…
Inside Out is the Platonic ideal of a Pixar movie. It begins with a simple idea, as though plucked from the brilliant creativity of an infant’s imagination – What do your toys do when you’re not around? What if the world was populated by cars? – or perhaps cribbed from a ’90s television producer –…
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