November 2015

November 2015

A Christmas Tale (Desplechin, 2008)|||||7.5
Bridge of Spies (Spielberg, 2015)|||||5.5
Prizzi's Honor (Huston, 1985)|||||5.5
The Errand Boy (Lewis, 1961)|||||5.5
Mission: Impossible (De Palma, 1996)|||||6.5
A Burning Hot Summer (Garrel, 2001)|||||7
My Golden Days (Desplechin, 2015)|||||6
Hamlet (Olivier, 1945)|||||8
Right Now, Wrong Then (Hong, 2015)|||||7
Hitchcock/Truffaut (Jones, 2015)|||||5.5
The Forbidden Room (Maddin, 2015)|||||5.5
What We Do In the Shadows (Waititi, Clement, 2014)|||||4
King Lear (Godard, 1988)|||||8.5
The Green Inferno (Roth, 2014)|||||5
Scarlet Street (Lang, 1945)|||||7.5

October 2015

October 2015

Tales of Halloween (Carolyn, Marshall, et al., 2015)|||||3.5
Knock Knock (Roth, 2015)|||||5
The Assassin (Hou, 2015)|||||5.5
The Last Broadcast (Avalos, Weiler, 1998)|||||5
* The ABCs of Death (Various, 2012)|||||4.5
A Dirty Shame (Waters, 2004)|||||5
Crimson Peak (Del Toro, 2015)|||||4.5
The ABCs of Death 2 (Various, 2014)|||||4.5
Tomorrowland (Bird, 2015)|||||6
Zvenigora (Dovzhenko, 1928)|||||8.5
The French Lieutenant's Woman (Reisz, 1981)|||||5
The Canyons (Schrader, 2013)|||||4
The Walk (Zemeckis, 2015)|||||4.5
Phoenix (Petzold, 2014)|||||6.5
Sicario (Villeneuve, 2015)|||||5

September 2015

September 2015

What Is It? (Glover, 2000)|||||4.5
The Visit (Shyamalan, 2015)|||||7
Queen of Earth (Perry, 2015)|||||6
Conquest (Fulci, 1983)|||||5.5
The American Astronaut (McAbee, 2001)|||||4.5
The Woman in Black 2: The Angel of Death (Harper, 2015)|||||3.5
Tokyo Gore Police (Nishimura, 2008)|||||4.5
Area 51 (Peli, 2015)|||||3.5
* New Nightmare (Craven, 1994)|||||5.5
Dear White People (Simien, 2015)|||||6.5
Tangerine (Baker, 2015)|||||5.5
Burying the Ex (Dante, 2014)|||||3.5
White Bird in a Blizzard (Arakki, 2014)|||||6
Music of the Heart (Craven, 1999)|||||5
The Mend (Magary, 2015)|||||6

August 2015

August 2015

Dark Horse (Solondz, 2014)|||||6
* It Follows (Mitchell, 2014)|||||5.5
Sleepless in Seattle (Ephron, 1993)|||||3.5
Best of Enemies (Gordon, Neville, 2015)|||||5
Othello (Welles, 1952)|||||8
* May (McKee, 2003)|||||7.5
Tom at the Farm (Dolan, 2014)|||||5.5
The World (Jia, 2004)|||||6
Whirlpool (Preminger, 1949)|||||5.5
Enemy (Villeneuve, 2013)|||||5
Run of the Arrow (Fuller, 1957)|||||8
* The Naked Spur (Mann, 1953)|||||6.5
Chappie (Blomkamp, 2014)|||||4
The Theory of Everything (Marsh, 2014)|||||4.5
Morocco (Sternberg, 1930)|||||6.5
Escape to Burma (Dwan, 1955)|||||5.5
* Songs from the Second Floor (Andersson, 2000)|||||5.5

July 2015

July 2015

* Rebel Without a Cause (Ray, 1955)|||||8
Kes (Loach, 1969)|||||6.5
Jersey Boys (Eastwood, 2014)|||||5
Big Hero Six (Hall, Williams, 2014)|||||4.5
A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (Andersson, 2014)|||||5.5
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 (Lawrence, 2014)|||||2.5
Empire of Passion (Oshima, 1976)|||||7.5
* American Sniper (Eastwood, 2014)|||||6
Sebastiane (Jarman, 1976)|||||7
Ex Machina (Garland, 2015)|||||4
Liliom (Borzage, 1930)|||||6.5
Street Angel (Borzage, 1928)|||||5.5
Breaking News (To, 2004)|||||6.5
At Long Last Love (Bogdanovich, 1975)|||||5
They All Laughed (Bogdanovich, 1981)|||||6
A Star is Born (Wellman, 1937)|||||6
Terminator: Genisys (Taylor, 2015)|||||3.5
Scream 4 (Craven, 2011)|||||4.5
La Sapienza (Green, 2014)|||||7

June 2015

June 2015

Al otro lado del espejo (Franco, 1973)|||||5
Nightmares Come at Night (Franco, 1970)|||||5.5
* Whiplash (Chazelle, 2014)|||||5
How Green Was My Valley (Ford, 1941)|||||7
The Wings of Eagles (Ford, 1957)|||||6
Nightcrawler (Gilroy, 2014)|||||4.5
Inside Out (Docter, 2015)|||||6.5
* Girlhood (Sciamma, 2014)|||||7
* The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (Ford, 1962)|||||7
The Visitor (Paradisi, 1979)|||||4
* Happy Birthday to Me (Thompson, 1981)|||||4
City of Pirates (Ruiz, 1983)|||||6.5
Jurassic World (Trevorrow, 2015)|||||3.5
Insidious: Chapter 3 (Whannell, 2015)|||||3
Mondo Hollywood (Cohen, 1964)|||||5.5
Je, tu, il, elle (Akerman, 1976)|||||8

May 2015

May 2015

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Amirpour, 2014)|||||5.5
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