• Heaven Knows What

    Capsule Reviews: May 2015 Limited Releases

    Aloft Indie drama which screened in competition at Berlin, about a desperate mother (Jennifer Connelly) who turns to a faith healer to cure her terminally ill son, and also about her traumatized other son (Cillian Murphy) who tracks her down 20 years later in the Canadian Arctic. Peruvian filmmaker Claudia ...
  • Mad Max: Fury Road

    Capsule Reviews: May 2015 Wide Releases

    Aloha Comedy (?) where Bradley Cooper plays a military contractor and former soldier who returns to Hawaii for a secret new assignment, where he makes amends with his ex (Rachel McAdams) and finds new love. Cameron Crowe (Jerry Maguire, Almost Famous, Vanilla Sky) was one of the most promising filmmakers ...
  • Captain America: The Winter Soldier

    Catching up with the Marvel Cinematic Universe

    For someone with a film blog who writes reviews and likes to think of himself as an authority on the current state of things in cinema, I had a shamefully huge, Marvel-sized hole in my knowledge. I had seen the first Iron Man and the first Captain America back in ...
  • Ex Machina

    Capsule Reviews: April 2015 Limited Releases

    Adult Beginners Indie comedy about a man who loses everything when his start-up tech company goes bust, then goes back to his hometown to stay with his sister and her family and start over. Nick Kroll (whom you may recognize as "it's that guy" from various TV and film comedies, ...
  • Unfriended

    Capsule Reviews: April 2015 Wide Releases

    The Age of Adaline Fantasy romance starring Blake Lively (The CW's Gossip Girl) as a woman who never ages, who must confront her long-kept secrets when she finds love unexpectedly. So much preposterous science and so many incredible coincidences to accept... but so much to enjoy (really!) if you can ...
  • How to Be Single

    How to Be Single

    So many romantic comedies feature female protagonists who are professionally successful, intelligent, and educated, but whose entire self-worth is nevertheless determined by whether or not they have a boyfriend. We’ve been trained by years of movies starring Meg Ryan and Sandra Bullock and Kate Hudson to think that a woman’s ...
  • Deadpool

    Deadpool

    We are living in a cinematic landscape of squeaky-clean, on-brand comic book franchises that tend to lean towards the conservative side of things in order to protect the image of the corporate brand. In the midst of all this carefully curated content, one major thing that we’ve been missing is ...
  • Hail, Caesar!

    Hail, Caesar!

    After the intense sadness that they wove throughout their last film, 2013’s great Inside Llewyn Davis, Joel and Ethan Coen switch gears into pure light-hearted silliness with their latest, Hail, Caesar! This isn’t the first time that the auteur brothers have made a broad all-star comedy to cleanse their palate ...
  • Synchronicity

    Synchronicity

    The past few years have been so generous in offering a number of really excellent science-fiction films. 2013’s Her raised so many questions about how human interaction has changed along with evolving technology, and examined the relationships and dependence we develop with and for our devices. 2014’s Under the Skin ...
  • Band of Robbers

    Band of Robbers

    So many adaptations have been done of Mark Twain’s seminal novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and its sequels that Tom and his pal Huckleberry Finn have long since become two of American literature’s most famous characters of all time. In this way, Tom and Huck could be called the ...