Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake is so unyieldingly empathetic that even its bleakest moments carry an air of triumph. In trying to create his paean to the working man Loach has stripped him of his three-dimensional humanity and replaced it…
Movie Review: A Man Called Ove
A Man Called Ove, a film about an old widower learning to accept the world (and the world learning to accept him back) fluctuates seamlessly between black comedy and domestic drama, touting laughs and tears in equal exchange. Formulating off life & death’s uneasy…
Movie Review: The Salesman
Asghar Farhadi’s films are not merely experiences attuned to our emotional stimuli but broad ethical questions attuned to the 21st Century’s increasingly complicated moral climate. The Salesman, like A Separation or The Past before it, provokes fiery debate by way…
Movie Review: Silence
Like a good deal of Martin Scorsese’s films, Silence handles the subject of faith in a complex and humanistic way; the legendary American filmmaker transmutes the torment, humiliation and suffering of two young, idealistic Jesuit priests, by the fiendish censors of Feudal Japan,…
Movie Review: I, Daniel Blake
Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake is so unyieldingly empathetic that even its bleakest moments carry an air of triumph. In trying to create his paean to the working man Loach has stripped him of his three-dimensional humanity and replaced it…
Movie Review: La La Land
Time melts away while watching Damien Chazelle’s latest, La La Land about the nature of being an artist, dating a fellow performer and how dreams and expectations are hard won and that perspective too is a difficultly earned gift in growing older. How…
Movie Review: The Handmaiden
The Handmaiden, like all of Park Chan-wook’s films, uses harsh methods to test the viewer’s fortitude, challenging their senses before rewarding their wisdom. Borrowing a good deal of its story from the Victorian-set novel Fingersmith, The Handmaiden is an atypically swoon-worthy…