This is my first Pinter and I should mention that I had no idea what I was getting into before I read it. I suspect that it would have made more of an impression on me had I seen it, rather than read it, simply because some of the tone of one of the characters …
Tag: Drama
Brute Force (1947, Jules Dassin)
This prison escape film has dated rather horribly in the ensuing years and so I can’t really recommend it, though there is nothing particularly bad about it (for the most part).
Gifted (2017, Marc Webb)
This is a film about one of those precocious child geniuses that only exist in Hollywood movies (and independent movies that wish they were Hollywood movies – I’m looking at your Good Will Hunting) and how such geniuses should be nurtured. In real life, nobody is quite as smart (or quite as high functioning if they …
Brokeback Mountain (2005, Ang Lee)
I think it’s probably hard to discuss Brokeback Mountain without talking about the hype: this film is considered by many to be a landmark either in Hollywood with regard to LGBTQ topics, or in LGBTQ cinema in general. Now, I don’t know much about the history of LGBTQ cinema – just what I got from a …
TIFF 2017: Omerta (2017, Hansal Mehta)
What a mess. Where do I begin?
Brooklyn (2015, John Crowley)
This is a well made and affecting drama about an Irish immigrant’s journey to Brooklyn, New York in the very early 1950s.
Dunkirk (2017, Christopher Nolan)
Hype is a terrible thing. So, no, I did not love Dunkirk. SPOILERS (if there can be spoilers for a movie based on a historical event).
Coherence (2013, James Ward Byrkit)
This is one of those super talky, high concept science fiction films which feels like it was written for the stage. (Many of these have been written for the stage, but this one apparently was not.) There are a lot of these films by this point and it’s sort of become its own sub genre. …
Bronson (2008, Nicholas Winding Refn)
There are probably two types of people: people who think Winding Refn is a genius and people who think he is ponderous, boring and way too interested in style over substance. You can count me among the latter. Despite all the praise over Valhalla Rising and Drive, I found both movies to be flawed. I …
Child of God (2013, James Franco)
This is a mess of a film, which feels like the work of a first time director. Far from it, as Franco has made tons of films only a few of which I was aware of; this is, impossibly, his 8th film.
Captain Phillips (2013, Paul Greengrass)
This film reminds me a lot of Black Hawk Down, a similarly politically clueless film about East Africa, which is so well made and so compulsively watchable that, as a white Canadian, I stop caring about its political cluelessness.
Body and Soul (1993)
I keep a list of movies to watch. There are thousands of movies on the list and I will never watch all of them. I add titles to it all the time. Occasionally, due to laziness, I omit the year a movie was released when I add a movie. I did that with the film …
Body of Lies (2008 Ridley Scott)
I have no idea whether or not this film is accurate as to the day to day actions of CIA operatives in the Middle East – I doubt it, but it is a fictional film after all – but, for much of its run, it is an effective political thriller with a strong sense of …
The Broken Circle Breakdown (2012, Felix van Groeningen)
This is a well-meaning, and well-acted film ostensibly about the breakdown of a relationship but equally about the clash of science and faith in the 21st century. It is, in my opinion, too ambitious, as well as too arty, for its own good. There’s plenty of good stuff, but the whole is less than the …
Broken (2013, Bright Wonder Obasi)
Had I not seen other Nollywood movies, I might have been shocked by how awful this film’s production values are. But having seen a number of Nollywood movies now, I know that this is actually above average when it comes to those production values. It’s only the sound that’s really, really awful (and only at …
Kill Your Darlings (2013, John Krokidas)
This is a well cast movie – the stars look pretty similar to the people they’re portraying – with committed performances from all of the leads. I wanted to like it. But there a few big problems. The mildest of spoilers.
Blissfully Yours aka Sud sanaeha (2002, Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
The hype would have us believe that this is one of the great films of the 21st century. At this point in my life, I have seen a lot of deliberately paced, enigmatic foreign films set in tropical idylls. Watching this, I am stuck wondering what it is that has made this one the one …
Black and White (1999, James Toback)
This overly self-serious film combines the sanctimonious air of a Hollywood message movie with the production values of a late ’90s independent film (real locations, often very woody acting) with the ambition of Paul Thomas Anderson. And it’s a mess. An annoying, sometimes embarrassing, sometimes cringe-inducing, hilariously inauthentic film.
Borgen (2010)
Borgen is a remarkable, unique Danish television show that may have established it’s own genre. Every other TV show to focus on politics that I have ever seen has added elements of fantasy; normally these shows and movies are “political thrillers” where someone always dies; occasionally they’re comedies. Either way, there is a balance between …
The Unknown Girl (2016, Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne)
This is one of those European “social realist” dramas that are extremely deliberately paced, feature no score and alienate a lot of North Americans because it feels like “nothing happens.” (Par for the course: there were plenty of walk-outs.) It’s unfortunate that so many of us over here feel like a film about a death …
Black Sea (2014, Kevin Macdonald)
For the most part, this is a pretty effective submarine movie with a great, out-of-character performance from Jude Law. It does what a submarine movie should do, and it does it well. There are, however, a few major quibbles that I have that hampered the movie in my mind. They involve some MAJOR SPOILERS.
Boyhood (2014, Richard Linklater)
Like most people who have seen this film, I have never seen anything like this before. Making a film over 12 years is impressive in and of itself, but it would be nothing if the film that Linklater made wasn’t worth watching. But is it ever worth watching.
Blue is the Warmest Color aka La vie d’Adele (2013, Abdellatif Kechiche)
This is an affecting, if long, coming of age story that contains perhaps the most graphic sex scenes I’ve ever seen in a coming of age movie (i.e. a movie involving “teens”). The film goes places other films don’t with the passion of “first love” thing, i.e. explicit sex. But there’s a lot more to …
Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980, Rainer Werner Fassbinder)
In 1980, there was no real way for for North American audiences to digest non-English language television. So, on occasions when multiple-episode television programs made there way over to North America, they were screened at film festivals as “films.” A number of European “art house” films from the ’70s and ’80s are actually made-for-tv miniseries. …
Mad Men (2007)
I watched Mad Men over an even longer period than most of you, so my memory of the individual episodes is not perfect. I know there were some weaker ones in there, and there even parts of seasons – perhaps even whole seasons – that I didn’t enjoy on the level of the best parts …
Bellflower (2011, Evan Glodell)
First of all, it’s really, really hard to like a movie when you don’t like any of the characters. (And I mean any.) And it’s hard to like a movie when you don’t understand why anyone does anything. These people drink all day and spend money. (And do some drugs too.) One of them appears …
The Just by Albert Camus, live at the Michael Young Theatre, March 9, 2016
This is a new translation of Les Justes that appears to have been written in light of what’s currently going on in the Middle East.
The Departed (2006, Martin Scorsese)
Note: I haven’t seen the original film.
Les invasions barbares (2003, Denys Arcand)
I stupidly watched this without having seen the first film, however I don’t think it matters.
Bakjwi aka Thirst (2009, Chan-woo Park)
The idea of vampires being used as some kind of metaphor for sex has probably been around for as long as vampires have been in literature. It’s not a new thing. And so, initially, this film feels like yet another in the endless line of erotic vampire films. However, the film has enough twists and …