Talking with fellow Boston Online Film Critics Association members Bob Chipman and Charlie Nash about a horror-saturated month in the city’s repertory film scene. Trigger Warning: This one gets kinda crass. – BOFCA, 09/30/2014
Monthly Archives: September 2014
STROKIN’: WILLIAM FRIEDKIN AT THE HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE
Legendary director William Friedkin spent last weekend at the Harvard Film Archive.
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN (SMITH)
“All the academic discussions of Star Wars and pornography, the non-stop masturbation jokes — Clerks was the closest thing I’d ever seen to my own life in a movie. Hell, not only did I work in a video store, I worked in a video store where Kevin Smith bought LaserDiscs. Watching that movie at the Angelika felt like somebody farted in church.” – Movie Mezzanine, 09/19/2014
A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES
“Cinematographer Mihai Malaimare Jr. shoots the city as a gorgeous ruin, favoring sparse wide shots with heavy negative space bearing down on these isolated characters. There’s a doomy grandiosity befitting the title, and when violence inevitably occurs it is something not to be cheered, but mourned.” – North Shore Movies, 09/19/2014
ATLAS SHRUGGED: WHO IS JOHN GALT?
“The most beautiful irony is that Altas Shrugged’s previous two installments proved so financially calamitous, Aligaro and his co-producers financed this one with the help of a Kickstarter campaign. Hard not to wonder what Ayn Rand would have thought about her precious bootstrap self-sufficiency manifesto being funded by begging for handouts.” – North Shore Movies, 09/16/2014
THE DROP
THE DROP * * 1 / 2
Starring Tom Hardy, Noomi Rapace, Matthias Schoenaerts, John Ortiz and James Gandolfini. Screenplay by Dennis Lehane. Directed by Michael R. Roskam.
THE SKELETON TWINS
“After seven years in the crucible of Studio 8H, Hader and Wiig effortlessly slip into a rapport that suggests a lifetime of shared experiences. Speaking a secret family language of private jokes and subtle, offhand acknowledgements, they know each other better than anybody else – which means they also know how to hurt each other worse than anyone else.” – Movie Mezzanine, 09/11/2014
LAST DAYS IN VIETNAM
“A riveting tale told in the most pedestrian and unimaginative fashion possible, absent any outrage or blame. Like far too many contemporary war films, Rory Kennedy’s Last Days in Vietnam would rather we celebrate individual acts of valor than question the larger, more rotten context that made them regrettably necessary.” – Movie Mezzanine, 09/04/2014
KELLY & CAL
“Juliette Lewis has always brought with her a messy sexuality and isn’t the kind of performer you catch ‘acting.’ She often throws herself so emotionally into roles that her slightly addled line readings sound not like words from a script, but things that just popped into her head for the first time and she’s not having an easy time at all getting them out.” – Movie Mezzanine, 09/02/2014
