Jailhouse to Milhouse (2024)
I had a minor resistance walking into Buddy [...]
Indie
The Neon Demon (2016)
“She’s a diamond among a sea of glass,” says a fashion designer of the pretty but not outrageously remarkable ingénue who has just arrived in L.A. to be part of its haughty fashion scene. Her name is Jesse and she stands out yet it is hard at first to figure out why. The body isn’t remarkable, […]
Nightcrawler (2014)
Nightcrawler is a wickedly brilliant thriller, a social satire and an eerie look into the mind of a sociopath who can manipulate with the power of cold-blooded reason. That sounds like a tall order, but this is a deceptively simple plot made functional by a well-mounted script and a near-perfect performance by Jake Gyllenhaal. Gyllenhaal […]
St. Vincent (2014)
Ten minutes into Theodore Melfi’s St. Vincent you’ve already figured out how it is going to end. Once the cute kid meets the crusty old coot next door who hates children – and humanity at large – the movie becomes a long slow drive down Highway Inevitable. When you reach the destination, there’s nothing to […]
The Machine (2014)
I can’t get anywhere without my GPS. I’m told that I am “directionally challenged.” I depend on my cell phone for so much that I could be accused leaving normal functions to wires and microchips. When I get home, I spend a majority of my time on the computer. I don’t think I’m alone. This […]
Living Things (2014)
Eric Shapiro’s Living Things is an exhausting experience, and that’s a good thing. There are no car chases, no gun battles, no cacophony of sound design. Here is a movie that is constructed almost entirely out of words. It contains only two actors, seated at a dinner table debating each other for just over an […]
Thale (2013)
It is safe to assume that Elvis and Leo do a job that few people could stomach. They clean up crime scenes. After the bodies have been removed, they clean up the pools of blood and bits of human remains that litter the scene. It’s not a pleasant job but somebody’s got to do it. […]
Compliance (2012)
Craig Zobel’s Compliance epitomizes the word “challenging. It presents a scenario that we are surprised to find is all too common and asks us to make a judgment call in our own minds about what we would do in the situation. It asks deep questions about who constitutes the limits of authority. The movie isn’t […]
Jack and Diane (2012)
To be clear, Jack and Diane has nothing whatsoever to do with John Cougar Mellencamp’s 1982 song of the same name. That song was a brilliant piece of Americana about two kids, a boy and a girl, growing up in Middle America. This movie is a disorganized piece of indie “realism” about two girls in […]
