15. The Immigrant – If one were to rank the films of 2014 based solely on innovation, The Immigrant would probably end up near the bottom. Writer-director James Gray’s languid melodrama tells the tumultuous story of a resilient Polish woman looking to find a slice of the American Dream, without much in the way of …
It’s been a great year for film music. I say that as someone who had to endure the laughably dated qualities of Alberto Iglesias’ Exodus: Gods and Kings and had to swallow the pill that is Howard Shore‘s latter days Middle-earth music. But it has been a great year. Clint Mansell gave us haunting, complex soundscapes in Noah, the …
40. Night Moves Since 2006, Kelly Reichardt has found a way to reach inside of the hearts of her audiences, plucking out strings one by one with desolate re-imaginations of the American Pacific Northwest, seen through the eyes of people not so different than ourselves. With Meek’s Cutoff, she departed from her typical genre and moved …
There exists a myriad of reasons why it often feels so terribly easy to aim criticisms at these so-called motion picture events. Some of them are related to the perceived quality, others have to do what certain cinephiles with attuned tastes expect from their movie going experiences as patrons. Movies for which so much money and effort are necessitated in order to produce demand, for perfectly legitimate reasons, important dividends in the form of paid tickets at the theatre and subsequently profits via home viewing platforms.
David Bordwell, one of film criticism’s eminent scholars and arguably most knowledgeable film historian working today, took to his blog, Observations on Film Art, Sunday to criticize the New York Times for a new series they’ve launched called “The Moviegoers“. In his piece titled “Zip, Zero, Zeitgeist“, Bordwell addresses a trend in film criticism he calls …
In 2011, the thought of rebooting Planet of the Apes seemed foolish. Then Rise of the Planet of the Apes came out, and blew audiences away. As a result, expectations were high for Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, the follow up to 2011’s successful venture. The results are remarkable, as Dawn offers not only a brilliant summer blockbuster, but also an emotionally powerful testimony to the nature of war and humility.
It would be easy to only view Dawn of the Planet of the Apes through the lens of previous Apes films. The references complement the new themes at work.