San Andreas (Peyton, 2015)|||||2.5
Saint Laurent (Bonello, 2014)|||||5.5
As Above, So Below (Dowdle, 2014)|||||3.5
Poltergeist (Kenan, 2015)|||||4
"A-artistic" but fun, inventive cartoon redux of the original. Pure gimmick, about 10x smaller in dramatic & narrative scale, but can we just savor a true big-budget tongue-in-cheek horror film? The Conjuring gets praise and this gets condescended to, Wan's "artful," "original" horror lauded over Kenan's classicalist irreverence, and the truer effort and care is actually the other way around. Last shot has an ecstatic effect and evil squirrel is brilliant.
Love is a Many-Splendored Thing (King, 1955)|||||5.5
Mogambo (Ford, 1953)|||||6
American Sniper (Eastwood, 2014)|||||7
Genre-film economy and expediency supersede ideology, and what results is Eastwood's hero tribute being as atmospheric and close-quarters, interiorized, and gloomily psychological as Antonioni esoteric-drama. Think of the war imagery in Bergman's The Silence and you get the overall atmosphere, think of the scenery of Antonioni's Red Desert and you've got Eastwood's backdrops - whether bars, a home, Fallujah, the wooded country of a Texas shooting range, etc. - serving as similarly lush spaces in which to tease apart the oppositional existence of (movie) Chris Kyle through alternating fluid blocking, observational close-ups, and cruel narrative contrivances, such as a scene of a presiding sandstorm standing uneasily in the stead of Red Desert's fog bank sequence.
Mad Max: Fury Road (Miller, 2015)|||||6
Dust in the Wind (Hou, 1987)|||||6.5
A Summer at Grandpa's (Hou, 1984)|||||6
The Plough and the Stars (Ford, 1936)|||||6
Fascination (Rollin, 1979)|||||5.5
Starry Eyes (Kolsch, Widmyer, 2014)|||||3.5
* RR (Benning, 2007)|||||6.5
* The Babadook (Kent, 2014)|||||5.5
