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Green Room is gut-wrenching, sometimes literally

Blue Ruin, Green Room.

Writer-director Jeremy Saulnier is certainly not a director afraid to deal in primal colors: the bright green woodlands of Oregon into which down-on-their-luck punk band The Ain’t Rights stray, playing an impromptu gig to an audience of neo-Nazis; the visceral red of the horrific gore that results when band member Pat (an endearingly mumbly Anton Yelchin) stumbles upon a murder.…

Everybody Wants Some!! will likely prove the feel-best film of 2016

In the last twenty-three years, it’s safe to say that Richard Linklater has moved on from Dazed and Confused. In the case of Everyone Wants Some!!, he hasn’t had to travel very far.

Linklater’s 1993 coming-of-age comedy is arguably the finest cinematic portrayal of the American high school experience since The Breakfast Club.…

A War loses sight of its dramatic conflict amid the haze of moral relativism

Few scenarios lend themselves to dramatization better than the battlefield and the courtroom.

The blood and chaos of the former; the eloquence and order of the latter. What Tobias Lindholm’s recent Best Foreign Language nominee, A War, does is reveal the paradox of trying to impose the process of law after the fact.…

Son of Saul recasts the Holocaust as Bruegelian nightmare

In Son of Saul, first-time director László Nemes gets us right up in the face of Saul Ausländer (poet-turned-actor Géza Röhrig).

Saul’s powerful features and dark eyes give him a sharp, watchful look. As a Hungarian Jew, and member of a Sonderkommando work unit at Auschwitz, it pays to be watchful.…

Demolition puts too little value on the smashy-smashy

Though his career goes back twenty years, including works as varied as ‘70s coming-out/coming-of-age story C.R.A.Z.Y. and prestige period drama The Young Victoria, fifty-three year-old Québécois director Jean-Marc Vallée has since become renowned for life-affirming tales of self-discovery in the wake of tragedy.

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Jane Got A Gun isn’t quite sure what to do with itself

While the social timeliness of the Western may not be what it once was — even in its most revisionist form it seems a bit old hat — the genre that once defined America seems determined to at least die with its boots on.

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In Eye in the Sky we say goodbye to Alan Rickman

Eye in the Sky is the type of film that lends itself to descriptors like “timely” and “prescient”.

It may not be the first drama to tackle the spectre of drone warfare – Ethan Hawke-starrer A Good Kill did so through the lens of a character study – but it is certainly has the weightiest cast.…

Ponderous and imponderable, Knight of Cups is, like its protagonist, easily led

Knight of Cups is a film you could drown in – a vast thematic ocean lapping against the distant shore of some grand, obscure vision. And I don’t have any f**king trunks.

As a director-philosopher (or should that be philosopher-director?),…

Eye in the Sky is a timely look at drone warfare (RIP, Alan Rickman)

Eye in the Sky is the type of film that lends itself to descriptors like “timely” and “prescient”.

It may not be the first drama to tackle the specter of drone warfare – Ethan Hawke-starrer A Good Kill did so through the lens of a character study – but it is certainly has the weightiest cast.…

Sunset Song is a lyrical but transitory ode to Scotland

The first impression you are likely to get Sunset Song, a long-awaited adaptation of the Lewis Grassic Gibson novel, is one of absolute lyricism.

Terrence Davies’ camera drifts circuitously over pale stalks of grain, which darken almost imperceptibly, perhaps as a cloud passes overhead.…