Review: Me Before You

If you were hoping for a weepy respite to the superhero stockpile, don't expect Me Before You to be your antidote. Consider this British would-be tearjerker the date movie equivalent of Batman v Superman: both ghastly and flat, and inert when it should be its most heart-stopping moments.

Based on the popular novel by Jojo Moyes (who adapted her own work), Me Before You stars Game of Thrones ingenue Emilia Clarke as Lou, a floundering and chatty young woman who takes a job caring for a local moneybags (and recently quadriplegic) Will Trainor (Sam Clafin of The Hunger Games saga). Will's mother (a shockingly underused Janet McTeer) has more on her mind than caregiving in hiring the girl, and Lou's effervescent warmth begins to thaw the man's dejected anger. The ensuing romance is rife for hot button discussion points and earnest emoting, but its clunky beigeness fails to stir much audience response...

Click to read more ...

Review: Chevalier

It’s Eric, with thoughts on the new art house release, Chevalier.  

First seen at the Locarno Film Festival last August, and now in limited release in the US, Greek filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari’s comedy focuses on six men onboard a ship in the Aegean Sea.  They challenge each other to an extended contest to see which one of them is “The Best Ever”.  They construct a series of games to compete against one another, but take the challenge even further to rate each other on every aspect of their behavior in an attempt to see who is the best man in the group.

It’s a fantastic premise, and Tsangari mines some rich comedy and pathos from it...

Click to read more ...

Doc Corner: Chantal Akerman's Finale is 'No Home Movie'

Glenn here. Each Tuesday we bring you reviews and features on documentaries from theatres, festivals, and on demand. This week we look at Chantal Akerman's final film, 'No Home Movie'.

If No Home Movie is any indication, then Chantal Akerman had a lot of creativity inside of her to offer at the time of her far too premature death at age 65. I have no doubt that this, her final film, will likely confound those who find their way to it out of mere curiosity, but – and this is true of many films by many filmmakers, but especially so here – No Home Movie is a film that will most definitely play as something far deeper and more personal to somebody who is more familiar with her back catalogue than somebody who isn’t.

I know that sometimes it sounds awfully pretentious to say that. Who can be expected to watch a filmmaker’s entire back catalogue? I nonetheless think that it is true that No Home Movie takes on added dimensions and weight if you have seen Akerman’s 1977 masterpiece News from Home, which was the audience’s first introduction to Natalia Akerman, the director’s mother. While she is neither seen nor heard in that earlier film – her first after the groundbreaking breakthrough Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles – her written word is narrated to us over rolling and static images of New York City to help give a sense of the fractured mother-daughter relationship at its core. [More...]

Click to read more ...

Review: X-Men Apocalypse

This review was originally published in Nathaniel's column at Towleroad

If you experience extreme deja vu at the movie’s this weekend, don’t panic – that’s just how summer movies play. Take X-MEN APOCALYPSE for example. The sixth film in the X-Men franchise will feel very familiar if you’ve seen any X-pictures before. And maybe even if you haven’t. So let us begin (again) with a short detour.

Oscar Isaac is the internet’s current boyfriend and an amazing actor and as is required by the law of desire he’s in everything now. He was used sparingly but potently in The Force Awakens last Christmas as dashing pilot Poe Dameron and he’s in theaters again in a much larger role as the big bad of X-Men Apocalypse...

Click to read more ...

Review: Weiner

To paraphrase Jean-Luc Godard: if you want your movie to hook an audience, all your story needs is a girl and a smoking gun. In Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg’s queasily absorbing political documentary Weiner, the two smash against one another on the dick pic-riddled smartphone of disgraced former congressman, Anthony Weiner of New York.

Capturing Weiner’s catastrophic 2013 New York City mayoral campaign from within the scrum and beyond the sack, the film scrutinizes the self-obsession of its candidate against his noble political ideals, and the media’s lethal manipulation of the former and abject disinterest in the latter. It is also a thrilling and meticulous account of a campaign staff in free-fall, with the candidate mistaking the whir of escaping air for flight. If D.A. Pennebaker’s The War Room shows us how the machinations of campaign politics successfully operate around pitfalls and personal indiscretions along the trail, Weiner demonstrates how the media can lethally wedge a dildo right between the gears.

More after the jump...

Click to read more ...