Review: Doctor Strange

A slightly abridged version of this review was originally published in Nathaniel's column at Towleroad

For a franchise sprung from the fantastic realm of comic books, Marvel movies have not been particularly exciting on a broad visual level.

Sure, they’ve consistently managed iconic little visual beats within setpieces and that's no small thing. But they’re never suffused their films with eye-popping aesthetics as a matter of atmosphere. (The two exceptions to this rule are Guardians of the Galaxy‘s garish cosmic cartooonishness and Thor‘s brassy mythological kitsch). The Marvel film is more likely to stage its action setpieces and earnest conversations in vast empty spaces like sterile corporate buildings, parking garages, airport tarmacs, or mountain ranges. Given this predilection, the second half of Doctor Strange is absolutely jarring in a welcome way, never failing to give you plenty to gawk at...

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Review: "Hacksaw Ridge"

by Chris Feil

Caught between championing pacifism and luxuriating in brutality, Hacksaw Ridge struggles to have it both ways. Telling the story of WWII medic Desmond T. Doss (Andrew Garfield), America’s first conscientious objector (a soldier refusing to bear arms) who rescued over seventy soldiers in a single night. What plays out is part old-fashioned star vehicle for Garfield and part survival epic.

The film is as bloodthirsty as Mel Gibson’s other directorial efforts despite Doss’s message at the center. There is more fascination in the multitude of ways military bodies can be destroyed than Doss’s moral stance against that very violence - Gibson’s gaze is never more invigorated than when someone is brutalized. While the third act could simply be presented as the grim reality of war, it is instead an aimless fetishizing of bloodshed. This won’t come as a surprise to the dissenters of Gibson’s filmography, but the habit is perhaps more glaring given it is directly at odds with the material. The taste level is questionable and the subject gets lost.

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Doc Corner: Revisiting 'The Loving Story'

For this weeks edition of Doc Corner we are celebrating the release of Jeff Nichols' Loving by looking back at the documentary that was quite clearly a heavy inspiration on it.

That Richard and Mildred Loving often got overlooked for their unwilling but necessary part in the civil rights movement is hardly surprising when you watch The Loving Story, Nancy Buiski’s sober and low-key documentary from 2011. The pair, quiet and dignified, do not make for the sort of protagonists that make traditional narratives – a comment that has come up throughout the festival release of Jeff Nichols’ feature adaptation. Theirs is a story of quiet suffering; their victory an almost anticlimactic ‘duh’ moment that it’s easy to see why it has taken so long to get films made about them.

But it is that very reserved nature that makes their story equally compelling. Mildred, especially, is a woman whose soft-spoken nature so often goes unseen by storytellers throughout moments of great historical upheaval. Buiski’s film doesn’t try to pad it out with flash and narrative diversions. Instead it lets the humanity of its story and the relevance of its themes permeate across wisely assembled talking heads (including the couple’s only surviving child, Peggy) and a treasure trove of fascinating archival footage, newsreels, and family photographs that makes up the bulk of the film’s short yet resourceful runtime.

The entire story of the Loving v Virginia case holds relevance today in the face of race and same-sex marriage. Their story is one of barbaric cruelty where they were subjected to being woken up in the middle of night with flashlights in their faces, their relationship opened up to the inspection and scrutiny of hate-filled bigots in positions of power.

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Review: South Korea's Oscar Submission "The Age of Shadows"

Tim here. Age of Shadows is currently making its way around the U.S. art house circuit, giving Americans our change to catch up with one of the biggest hits at the Korean box office this year. It's a historical spy thriller, set during a period of time that I suspect most of us English-speakers haven't thought about much, or at all: the stretch of time from 1910 to the end of World War II when Korea was occupied by Japan.

The film, set in the 1920s, takes as its subject the Korean resistance to Japanese rule, and follows the career of a double agent named Lee Jung-chool (Korean superstar Song Kang-ho), a Korean-born police captain operating under strict Japanese control...

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Doc Corner: Michael Moore Goes to 'Trumpland'

Michael Moore in Trumpland is a misnomer of a title. For despite the comically scored pro-Trump vox pop interviews that open the film, and despite the smattering of apparent Trump supporters through the audience, Michael Moore’s has found himself the most liberal of audiences one could hope. “Around here, I ain’t heard nobody for Clinton” says one unidentified woman, but if that were the case then the crowd Moore has amassed are easily swayed because by the end of this brief 70-minute mix of stand-up, pre-filmed comedy sketches, call and response, and personal recollections in monologue, the entire crowd is cheering and whooping for Hillary.

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