Newtown (Snyder, 2016)
It's never the common elements of these stories that get to you--it's the personal, authenticating details.
Category: Reviews
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Starving the Beast: The Battle to Disrupt and Reform America’s Public Universities (Mims, 2016)
In ninety-five minutes, director Steve Mims traces the origins of educational reform, drawing a line from Clayton Christensen's meta-narrative about "disruptive innovation" to battles over the administration of public universities in Texas, Louisiana, Wisconsin, Virginia, and North Carolina.
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Midnight Special (Nichols, 2016)
The oddest thing about Nichols's Spielberg mashup is that its strengths and weaknesses are the exact opposite of what you might expect from the creator of Mud and Take Shelter. There are moments of iconic beauty and visual terror, but the writing is plodding and the slow pace eventually makes one realize just how little story there is to unfold. .
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Fantastic Lies (Zenovich, 2016)
Still, it's hard to overstate just how deeply resentment of Duke runs in North Carolina, how much class, race, and gender divisions made people not just want to believe the accusations were true but assume they must be.
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Everybody Wants Some!! (Linklater, 2016)
Richard Linklater's Everybody Wants Some!! isn't exactly Men With Guns--it doesn't deliberately push mainstream audiences away--but neither is it the follow up to Boyhood that I was hoping for.
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The Liberators (Bryant, 2016)
Pop quiz: You find out your father/brother/uncle/neighbor stole a bunch of priceless religious artifacts from an abbey in Nazi Germany. What do you do?
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An Inconvenient Truth (Guggenheim, 2006) — 10 Years Later
In HBO’s psychotherapy melodrama In Treatment, Paul Weston (Gabriel Byrne) shares a counselor’s riddle with a patient: “Why doesn’t a cigarette smoker think a cigarette can kill him?”… Continue reading "An Inconvenient Truth (Guggenheim, 2006) — 10 Years Later"
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The Devil Wears Prada (Frankel, 2006) — 10 Years Later
It’s morning in Manhattan and the legion of the city’s models rise. They dress in a beautiful catalog of lingerie, skirts and stilettos and open their cabinets full of luxury makeup and eyeliner. When they hail taxis with cutting precision, they clutch their designer purses in their other arms. All of this opening scene takes place to the sound of KT Tunstall 2005 pop hit, “Suddenly I See,” which is perhaps a little too on the mark. We hear lyrics like, “She’s a beautiful girl / and everything around her is a silver pool of light,” and “Suddenly I see / This is what I want to be,” and we can’t help but wonder if The Devil Wears Prada will be 109 minutes of glorifying the fashion industry.
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“Telling a Great Story” — An Interview with Disney’s Mark Henn
There is a certain stigma attached to adults watching animated films, as if they are doing something that is only for children. Henn works to change that misconception, “We create films that are hopefully enjoyed by everybody.”
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Is Snow White Still Essential?
When was the last time you actually watched Snow White?