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

April 2015

April 2015

Clouds of Sils Maria (Assayas, 2014)|||||7.5
Saudade (Rousseau, 2012) (Short)|||||++
Exodus: Gods and Kings (Scott, 2014)|||||3.5
Repo Man (Cox, 1984)|||||7
Cremaster 2 (Barney, 1999)|||||7
Cremaster 5 (Barney, 1995)|||||5.5
Invaders from Mars (Menzies, 1953)|||||4.5
Unexpectedly no-nonsense thrills from a film purportedly about a kid, for kids. Killing little Cathy and an assassination attempt automatically makes this the hardcore version of Tobe Hooper's dreamy Spielbergian remake. Scientific progressivism & American moral rationalism is dialectically, glowingly touted while the "cold" Commies, umm, "have their reasons," making this the ne plus ultra of "Those were the good old days... or were they?" cinema.
Outrage (Kitano, 2010)|||||6.5
Big Eyes (Burton, 2014)|||||6
Ashes and Diamonds (Wajda, 1958)|||||6.5
Recount (Roach, 2008) (TV)|||||4
* Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958)|||||9
Liverpool (Alonso, 2008)|||||7
The Quiet Ones (Pogue, 2014)|||||4
* The Birds (Hitchcock, 1963)|||||9.5
I devoted much adolescent thought to The Birds, but it needed none of that bit-chomping, psychoanalytical, thesis/support-driven discourse. It is simply stunning at every turn and, by the end, utterly moving on a level of complete artistic experience, making my callow, erstwhile attempts to concede that tiny note of Melanie and Lydia Brenner giving in to each others' embraces at the end as "sentiment" seem like the greatest misunderstanding of a work of complete and total sight.  The Birds is one of the truest achievements of the cinema, our good work's truest testament to an existence of doubt and pain.
* Interstellar (Nolan, 2014)|||||6
It Follows (Mitchell, 2015)|||||5.5

March 2015

March 2015

Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief (Gibney, 2015)|||||5.5
Shock Treatment (Sharman, 1981)|||||6
Listen Up Philip (Perry, 2014)|||||6.5
* Wes Craven's New Nightmare (Craven, 1994)|||||5.5
Interior. Leather Bar. (Mathews, Franco, 2013)|||||4
An Honest Liar (Measom, Weinstein, 2014)|||||5
John Wick (Stahelski, 2014)|||||4.5
Scream 3 (Craven, 2000)|||||5
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (Ford, 1949)|||||6.5
* Magnolia (Anderson, 1999)|||||5.5
Citizenfour (Poitras, 2014)|||||6
Cymbeline (Almereyda, 2014)|||||5.5
* Anatomy of a Murder (Preminger, 1959)|||||6
* Rabid Dogs (Kidnapped Edit) (Bava, 1974)|||||5.5
The Purge: Anarchy (DeMonaco, 2014)|||||4
The Purge (DeMonaco, 2013)|||||4
... And God Spoke (The Making Of) (Borman, 1993)|||||5
Capote (Miller, 2005)|||||5
The 40-Year-Old Virgin (Apatow, 2005)|||||3.5
Crank (Neveldine/Taylor, 2006)|||||5.5
The Thoughts That Once We Had (Andersen, 2015)|||||7.5
Where is the Friend's Home? (Kiarostami, 1987)|||||7
* AVP: Alien vs. Predator (Anderson, 2004)|||||3.5
Cinderfella (Tashlin, 1960)|||||6
The Parallax View (Pakula, 1974)|||||6.5
Timecrimes (Vigalondo, 2007)|||||5.5