In a general way, I think that the saddest stories are the ones that depict injustice against decent people. Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan does more than this, processing an archetypal Russian film protagonist named Kolya through an almost-comically horrible downfall at the hands of political evil. ...
Joel Potrykus’ Buzzard is a comedy about the kind of adults who have toy lightsaber battles in their parents’ basements, and it is surely the most unsettling movie ever made to feature such a scene. Its hero is a man named Marty who appreciates the comforts of frozen-pizza sandwiches stuffed with ...
The two primary characters of Ida, the most recent Polish language film from director Paweł Pawlikowski, appear to perfectly contradict each other. “The slut and the saint,” says one of the two. On the eve of pledging her life to a Catholic monastery, Ida, an orphan approaching adulthood, is told ...
The Rotten Tomatoes description of Noah says that it succeeds in “… bringing the Bible epic into the 21st century.” That’s a case of damning with faint praise if I’ve ever seen it. What does it mean to “modernize” an old, canonical story? What sorts of prejudices are inherent in that kind ...
If my childhood friend group is any indication, there are a few distinct and mutually exclusive ways to play with Legos. There is the rule-follower, who builds the thing on the front of the box per instructions. Next, there is the engineer who ignores the instructions in favor of his own plan, carefully ...
A fair number of these films are famous in one circle or another, but have yet to have the Middlebury Reel Critic stamp of approval. Now they can rest assured that they are truly the best films of 2013. The Act of Killing This is a movie that attempts to do no less than change our understanding of ...
Llewyn Davis says that a folk song is never new and never gets old. If true, the same must be said for the whole of the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis, a movie both about the life of a folk singer and itself structured as a folk song. The basic plot points feel like verses in a strange folk odyssey; ...
Captain Phillips is at its core a story about leadership – the weight that any captain or leader must bear to do their job. It is first about the titular Captain Phillips (Tom Hanks) and his responsibilities on an American cargo ship: breaking in a new crew and then getting them to follow his lead ...
It feels like The World’s End was made using some kind of miraculous alchemy. This is the third movie by director/writer team Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg which is spastically, ridiculously funny while somehow remaining sincere and even poignant. The basic structure sees the once cool, now-alcoholic ...
Blue Jasmine is a distortion and finally an erosion of the familiar Woody Allen character study, a film that is smart and unrelenting, but flawed. This is still a movie inseparably tied to Woody Allen – the jazz soundtrack and the basic Allen idiosyncrasies remain. The titular Jasmine (Cate Blanchett) ...