MOVIES I MISSED IN 2014: OPEN UP AND LET THE DEVIL IN

In the 2010s, one of the most interesting new directorial voices anywhere in the English-speaking world has been that of Great Britain’s Ben Wheatley. Without having produced any clear-cut unambiguous masterpieces in in the handful of features and short contribution to the horror anthology The ABCs of Death (one of the lonely few segments of that film that’s worth any damn at all - it is, in fact, my favorite) that make up his career since 2009,...

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GRIN AND BEAR IT

The word that primarily suggests itself in respect to Paddington, roughly muscling out all other possibilities, is "charming". A word which could certainly be employed with a certain level of condescension, sure, but not really in this case. For it is an earned charm, in Paddington; the screenplay by director Paul King, from a story he and Hamish McColl adapted from Michael Bond's series of children's books, reeks with lighthearted affection for...

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HACK WORK

If your chief hope from the movies is that they tell well-crafted stories in a logically committed way, then no, Blackhat probably would not seem very good. The script by Morgan Davis Foehl isn't deficient, so much as it is vary puffy and disorganised, with no end to its dragged-out moments and inefficiencies, including a lengthy chunk in the back half of the film that hopscotches around Southeast Asia without any sense of narrative economy at all....

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2014: CRIMINAL BEHAVIOR

Having been shot in color and on media that doesn't look like a 30-year-old VHS camcorder, telling something that resembles a story pretty much no matter how you look at it, and gliding in at a whimsical four hours and ten minutes, Norte, the End of History certainly earns its reputation as director Lav Diaz's easiest movie.* This means it's also probably in the top 300 easiest films released commercially in the United States in 2014. It's downright...

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CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL '14: TIMBUKTU (ABDERRAHMANE SISSAKO, MAURITANIA / FRANCE

Reposting on the day of the film's U.S. theatrical release, because it was one of the clear highlights of my very satisfying 2014, and it never hurts to remind people when a masterpiece is hanging around, waiting to be seen.Winner of the Silver Hugo for Best DirectorScreens at CIFF: 10/15 & 10/16World premiere: 15 May, 2014, Cannes International Film FestivalThere is a heightened irony at the heart of Timbuktu that is completely obvious, and...

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BOY OH BOY

There's very little doubt that The Boy Next Door is a terrible movie. But it is so cheerfully overt about it that it offers the very real possibility that everybody involved in making not only knew just how terrible it was, but in fact that they might actually have signed specifically because of that fact. We've all seen the ads, I hope and pray, where a sexually predatory high school student played by Ryan Guzman, (who looks every millisecond of...

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2014: THE YEAR IN MOVIES

Most years, this is the part where I grouse a little bit about how, to quote one of the year's best performances, I just thought there'd be more. That the movies would be a bit more inspiring, more fun, more challenging.But I will not be doing that here. The films released in the United States in 2014 made it, as a body, one of the strongest years of film I can remember living through, and certainly my favorite in the decade that I've been blogging....

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ONE DECADE LATER

Thanks to everyone who contributed - we raised a grand total of $5335!Ten years ago on this date, I spoke to a very kind doctor at Evanston Northwestern Hospital (since sold and renamed NorthShore Evanston Hospital), and he told me that in all likelihood, I had testicular cancer. One week later, and one testicle lighter, a different doctor, with the associated Kellogg Cancer Care Center, confirmed this likelihood as a certainty, and we made plans for my chemotherapy schedule and eventual surgery to remove a mass from a lymph node near my left lung.I'm...

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IT'S A HELL OF A THING, KILLING A MAN

It seems irresponsible to review American Sniper without doing so through the lens of the enormous cultural conversation surrounding it, but having actually seen the damn movie, it strikes me as rather bizarre that so many tens of thousands of words have already been spent discussing it without most of them being, y'know, accurate. Given the parameters of The Dialogue around the movie being so divorced from what seems to me to be its reality, I don't...

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