Blair Witch Returns to the Woods of Burkittsville
This decades-late sequel to The Blair Witch Project demonstrates director Adam Wingard’s talent behind the camera …along with his reluctance to innovate.
One Girl. One Night. One Take. One Waste of Time: Victoria’s Failed Experiment
There’s no particular reason why this generic German crime/romance-thriller needs to be executed in a single take, aside from it making good marketing copy. It sure doesn’t make for a good movie.
Lenny Abrahamson’s Room Expertly Plays On Your Heartstrings
One of the biggest surprises of this year’s Oscars’ nominations was Room, which picked up largely-unexpected nods for Best Picture and Best Director. Even Lenny Abrahamson, Room’s director, was surprised by his inclusion on the list (at the expense of Ridley Scott, if the pundits are to be believed). Abrahamson – who broke through with…
The Martian is the Anti-Alien – an Optimistic Paean to Science and Nerddom
Three-and-a-half decades ago, Alien established Ridley Scott as a director to watch. Drawing on the conventions of the increasingly-popular slasher film and rejecting the Star-Trek-esque optimism of the sci-fi films of that era, he created a chilling classic. But his potential as a director has dribbled away somewhat in the years since; while I don’t…
Documentary Run-Down: Amy; What Happened, Miss Simone?; Going Clear and Citizenfour
For whatever reason, I seem to have been watching a lot of documentaries lately, and I’m becoming increasingly aware that, by and large, my reaction to the genre is a shrug and an “It was okay, I guess.” I’ve seen so many good documentaries, portraits of fascinating people telling fascinating stories … and, yet, I’ve…
Proxy (2014)
Proxy is two hours of emotional and narrative withholding which combines preposterous thriller and horror movie tropes together into a flat, underwhelming experience. That flatness is almost certainly intentional (it’s hard to imagine any director getting such unemotive performances unintentionally), but it only served to disengage me from the proceedings, blunting the impact of a…
Computer Chess (2013)
If you believe The Dissolve and The AV Club, Computer Chess is one of the best films of 2013. I don’t entirely agree, but the film is appealingly different, an eccentric little movie filmed using (comparatively) ancient video cameras. It initially concerns a gaggle of geeks in the 1980s competing in a tournament pitting chess-playing…
ccpopculture 