On the surface, Digging For Fire doesn’t diverge significantly from the previous Joe Swanberg flicks I’ve seen. It’s populated by funny, attractive actors (the likes of Brie Larson, Orlando Bloom, Chris Messina, Anna Kendrick and Sam Rockwell) casually the shooting the shit (often in various states of undress). Pretty much everyone is on the boundary…
Fade in on London in the 1960’s. A female voice (Emily Browning) narrates our story. The story of the Crays twins, infamous Gangster Princes of the East End. One suave and loquacious, the other gritty and a little bent. Legend’s first hour is exceptional. It’s what I was expecting walking in, with Tom Hardy playing…
It’s pretty hard to go about making a film about Whitey Bulger, because how do you make it not like every other sub-Scorsese, heated-up-bullshit gangster movie? All the basic elements of the Whitey Bulger story – corrupt feds, brother on the other side of the law, paranoiac crime lord – are well-worn clichés in the…
Here is an Italian buddy comedy with a message: a message that had me rolling my eyeballs and impatiently checking my watch. Four oddball numskulls decide, after one meeting, to buy equal shares in a fixer-upper holiday resort. They proceed to fend off the local mafia while improbably working out differences and achieving financial success.…
Romantic comedies, as a rule, tend to get a bad rap. About half the time it’s deserved, as cliché follows cliché while subpar acting combines with flimsy plot development. (Doesn’t mean I don’t love them.) Learning to Drive, however, strays as far from this stereotype as possible while still falling under the rom-com umbrella. In the…
Ride is a study in contrasts. The most obvious contrast is between its two settings. There’s the fast-paced New York in which the tale begins, where editor Jackie (Helen Hunt, who also wrote and directed the film) and her wannabe-writer son Angelo (Brenton Thwaites) bicker about punctuation over coffees. And then there’s sun-drenched Venice, California;…
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…
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…
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…
Andrei Konchalovksy’s The Postman’s White Nights consciously blurs the line between documentary and fiction, with an introductory title card noting that the characters are primarily played by residents of the rural community of Lake Kenozero. This presumably positions the film as commentary on contemporary Russia. It sort of is; the film’s strongest stretch is its…
ccpopculture 