|
——
|
A Rubberband Is An Unlikely Instrument (2013)
|
"Why make a documentary about these people? Honestly, it beats me... but the director has certainly made something beautiful around them anyway, an artful and thoughtful consideration its subjects perhaps don't deserve."
|
Henry Stewart
|
|
71%
|
My Amityville Horror (2013)
|
"Works best not as a ghost story but as a psychological portrait of a man in denial. Danny seems possessed most of all by a need to ascribe to real-world "evil" a fantastical origin, as though he's unable to make sense of the world as it is."
|
Henry Stewart
|
|
82%
|
Sightseers (2013)
|
"The movie isn't really about the environment or the proletariat: it feels more like a rebuke of nostalgia for pastoral England. (Also, tourists are the worst!)"
|
Henry Stewart
|
|
78%
|
Pieta (2013)
|
"The main character is the monstrous embodiment of unchecked capitalism. How's this for a metaphor: he profits off crippling the working poor with their own machinery!"
|
Henry Stewart
|
|
38%
|
Aftershock (2013)
|
"Many main characters die, and those who survive them weep... but I don't care, because these people were always as ugly and cruel on the inside as the world now is on the outside."
|
Henry Stewart
|
|
88%
|
What Maisie Knew (2013)
|
"The filmmakers can move Henry James's novel of Victorian decadence to contemporary New York City because the underlying concept is timeless: some people are just really bad parents. "
|
Henry Stewart
|
|
47%
|
The Lords of Salem (2013)
|
"There seems to be some serious misogyny and Catholicism at the movie's core... But Zombie executes the story with such impressive artistry, an impressionism that borders on abstraction, that the subtext is easy to look past."
|
Henry Stewart
|
|
70%
|
Somebody Up There Likes Me (2013)
|
"I haven't laughed more at a movie in years... suggests every life, forever, is meaningless and unfulfilling. So you may as well treat yourself to a couple of yuks. "
|
Henry Stewart
|
|
87%
|
The Silence (2013)
|
"The story's brutality is at odds with the director's calculated, almost mannered aestheticism... it must be his way of trying to comfort us--lending a little beauty to a place clearly devoid of it."
|
Henry Stewart
|
|
30%
|
Gut Renovation (2013)
|
"The director looks at change in Williamsburg and says it's stupid and she hates it. And so she comes off looking worse than the yuppies she decries."
|
Henry Stewart
|
|
78%
|
Red Flag (2013)
|
"Demonstrates how talking isn't just the tool of the honest man--it's also the bullshitter's."
|
Henry Stewart
|
|
60%
|
Almost In Love (2013)
|
"Gimmicky, but also smartly conceived and executed."
|
Henry Stewart
|
|
56%
|
Would You Rather (2013)
|
"This movie is many things: a ridiculous horror film; a nice little showcase for talented character actors; an indictment of the One Percent; and a grand metaphor for capitalism."
|
Henry Stewart
|
|
87%
|
Happy People: A Year in the Taiga (2013)
|
"The people are happy, sure, but I feel like we're supposed to believe they're happier, too. Just as reasonably, you could say Siberia looks cold, hard, and lonely, and that Herzog is being a bit naive."
|
Henry Stewart
|
|
86%
|
Supporting Characters (2013)
|
"Demonstrates how life is actually more complicated than art: it's not so easily rewritten; characters are not so easily spliced out of the stories of our lives."
|
Henry Stewart
|
|
100%
|
My Brooklyn (2013)
|
"The movie does an excellent job of outlining how gentrification results from city policy... That is, don't hate the hipsters--hate Bloomberg and his real-estate pals."
|
Henry Stewart
|
|
51%
|
Promised Land (2013)
|
"The script's psychological acuity is what makes the movie more than a mere Issue Film--or rather, that makes it a great one."
|
Henry Stewart
|
|
——
|
Sahkanaga (2012)
|
"You get a sense that what Summerour admires about [the real-life townspeople who don't come off particularly well in his film is] that they at least have the potential to be as beautiful as the Georgian landscapes within which they live."
|
Henry Stewart
|
|
80%
|
The Sheik and I (2012)
|
"I hated Zahedi and this movie for most of its running time, seething in my seat at his callous disrespect, his obnoxiousness, the way he seemed to be putting local people's lives and livelihoods at risk for some stupid personal obsession."
|
Henry Stewart
|
|
40%
|
New Jerusalem (2012)
|
"A gentle character study, steeped in Southern masculinity, that finds faith, friendship, family, and even an epileptic cat can offer some help toward fighting the fear that keeps us closed off, crying in the bathroom at work."
|
Henry Stewart
|
|
98%
|
Beware Of Mr. Baker (2012)
|
"The director's smart enough not to wonder how someone so antisocial could be so talented. The movie's point is that Baker's attitude is inseparable from his artistry."
|
Henry Stewart
|
|
46%
|
The Comedy (2012)
|
"The title describes not the film, though it's often darkly funny, but the main character's life, which he lives as a kind of meta satire of life itself."
|
Henry Stewart
|
|
80%
|
Strings (2004)
|
"Released in 2004, a year after the War in Iraq had begun, there's a lot of Bush-era Middle East allegory packed in here."
|
Henry Stewart
|
|
——
|
First Winter (2012)
|
"The moral feels religious: we struggle through adversity to reach enlightenment."
|
Henry Stewart
|
|
——
|
Girl Walk: All Day (2012)
|
"[Captures] the joy, the exuberance, of being alive in the city."
|
Henry Stewart
|
|
20%
|
Deadly Blessing (1982)
|
"What clearly shapes up as a Reagan-era cautionary tale about religious extremism turns into a vindication of it instead. (The ending, by the way, is totally nutso.)"
|
Henry Stewart
|
|
61%
|
Maniac (2013)
|
"Overwrought is too weak a word to describe this bloody and unhinged remake [about] a literal objectifier of women: he destroys their humanity, robs them of their personhood, and recreates them as things."
|
Henry Stewart
|
|
93%
|
Sleep Tight (2012)
|
"A crazy movie that only gets crazier, relishing testing the audience to imagine just how mean it can be. It's even meaner than that."
|
Henry Stewart
|
|
76%
|
The Bay (2012)
|
"Many horror films supposedly culled from discovered tapes often have something critical to say about the ubiquity of cameras today, but this movie does the opposite; it suggests that the prevalence of recording devices isn't so bad..."
|
Henry Stewart
|
|
14%
|
Grave Encounters 2 (2012)
|
"...about movies, specifically the contemporary camera culture: obsessive documentation is not just killing us, literally and not, the movie suggests, but also making us its slaves, charged with finding more victims for it to feed off of."
|
Henry Stewart
|
|
82%
|
Seven Psychopaths (2012)
|
"Personal examination, both of the artist and his art... It feels [defensive]: that in a world that's already psychopathic, some kinds of violence, whether in real life or in art, are necessary."
|
Henry Stewart
|
|
——
|
Chicks (La Vie Au Ranch) (2012)
|
"The film understands that the fights you have when you're young are merely incidental; it's the revelry with your closest friends that defines a youth. That is, it's not the love you make--it's the drinks you drank."
|
Henry Stewart
|
|
21%
|
Taken 2 (2012)
|
"Sure, those dead men may have been involved in sexual slavery, either as ringleaders or as muscle, but they were also fathers and husbands, sons and grandsons...almost--almost--asks us to consider it a matter of perspective, a problem of moral equivalency"
|
Henry Stewart
|
|
94%
|
Room 237 (2013)
|
"[It] doesn't just get to the bottom of THE SHINING--[it] gets to the very essence of spectatorship."
|
Henry Stewart
|
|
93%
|
Barbara (2012)
|
"You could say Christian Petzold makes thrillers, but they're less concerned with plot than the sociopolitical conditions their characters inhabit."
|
Henry Stewart
|
|
54%
|
V/H/S (2012)
|
"Born of generational nostalgia for the filmmakers' earliest experiences of cinema--especially horror films..."
|
Henry Stewart
|
|
——
|
Marilena de la P7 (2006)
|
"There's a lot of Ceaucescu-era misery here... there's no happy ending--just violent, senseless tragedy. Still, like the best recent Romanian filmmakers, Nemescu maintains his sense of humor..."
|
Henry Stewart
|
|
11%
|
About Cherry (2012)
|
"Welcome to the world of pornographic video--not just the titillating shoots themselves, but the quotidian backend, too: the job interviews, the forms to fill out, the pauses to adjust a camera angle. It's how the sausage gets made before it gets sucked."
|
Henry Stewart
|
|
93%
|
Sun Don't Shine (2013)
|
"Sort of like DOUBLE INDEMNITY if its first two-thirds had been cut..."
|
Henry Stewart
|
|
38%
|
[REC] 3 Genesis (2012)
|
"As Catholic as the previous entry, in which the virus was a metaphor for modernity's contagious godlessness. You could easily read the outbreak here as a metaphor for the evil unleashed by a woman who's already pregnant on her wedding day."
|
Henry Stewart
|
|
75%
|
Green (2012)
|
"A quiet and elegant study in whether love can withstand relocation--an anxiety common to many a Brooklyn transplant."
|
Henry Stewart
|
|
55%
|
Beloved (2012)
|
"A globe-trotting, era-spanning, multi-generational epic, a colorful, stylish and sexy tragedy, no less than the history of the second half of the 20th century. It's also a musical. "
|
Henry Stewart
|
|
89%
|
Compliance (2012)
|
"Sinister, humiliating, demeaning, and cruel, capable of dredging up the vilest emotions in its viewers, directed both at the world around them, the people nearest them, and their deepest selves."
|
Henry Stewart
|
|
98%
|
Vertigo (1958)
|
"For all intents and purposes, Vertigo is THE movie."
|
Henry Stewart
|
|
77%
|
Killer Joe (2012)
|
"Friedkin pushes Letts's material to its zany extremes."
|
Henry Stewart
|
|
29%
|
Red Lights (2012)
|
"Super-serious and strange..."
|
Henry Stewart
|
|
67%
|
The Pact (2012)
|
"The first scene boasts one of the best-conceived scares I've seen in years..."
|
Henry Stewart
|
|
43%
|
To Rome with Love (2012)
|
"Against eternally excellent architecture, the ruins of a once great civilization, we observe the petty shenanigans of the ruins of human culture--modern humanity, with its vapid fame complexes and psychosexual obsessions."
|
Henry Stewart
|
|
6%
|
The Tortured (2012)
|
"A thinking man's movie for dummies."
|
Henry Stewart
|
|
73%
|
Dark Horse (2012)
|
"America loves a winner, but Todd Solondz loves a loser."
|
Henry Stewart
|
74%
22%
63%
85%
46%
40%
