Taken in its context as the opener and lead single of Everything But the Girl’s 11th studio album, Fuse, “Nothing Left to Lose” almost seems…
Karim Moussaoui’s Until the Birds Return boasts a multi-narrative, ensemble structure, weaving between the lives of three modestly connected sets of characters. The film’s focus is on the subjects’…
Ryan Coogler’s Rocky spin-off Creed begins, evocatively, in a juvenile corrections facility. A handsomely framed shot depicts a line of African-American boys filing through a…
Period homages or allusions to Hollywood’s past can be diminished without a new perspective to contextualize them. This is to say, reviving a given style can be limiting without some…
Oren Moverman’s quietly moving wartime drama The Messenger arrives just months after the release of Kathryn Bigelow’s much-hyped action-drama The Hurt Locker, two thematically similar, yet…
Modest Sundance hit The Answer Man is one of those films that seems to erase itself from your memory days after seeing it. It’s a hokey…
In 2006, popular British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen (of Da Ali G Show) and Masked and Anonymous director Larry Charles (who also scripted some Seinfeld…
To those closely following current cinema trends, it’s relatively common knowledge that when a film is tagged with the word “indie,” this label refers to…
Until now, the critically acclaimed filmmaker Joe Wright has had an impressive career. In 2005, Wright moved from made-for-television productions like Charles II: The Power…
If you could live your life all over again, would you do anything differently? Is there a crucial, life-altering moment in your past that you…
Julia Roberts hasn’t been the centerpiece of a film since the moderate success Mona Lisa Smile six years ago. Distracted by kids, a new husband,…
Two Lovers is the fourth feature from James Gray, whose efforts haven’t been unreservedly praised since his 1994 debut, Little Odessa, and who has been…
Essential to success within the medium of cinema is, of course, a film’s visual character, supplementing and even re-characterizing any narrative core. Jonathan Demme’s recent…
Stephen Daldry’s new Holocaust picture is the sort of film often released around this time of year; sobering, sweeping and punctuated by swooping violins and…