Film Reviews
Pitch Perfect: College Notes
It’s the Bring It On of a cappella singing competitions!KRISTIAN LIN
Between Glee, YouTube, and TV’s various singing competition shows, our pop culture is awash in cover songs like never before. That’s why the spectacle of a bunch of mostly white college girls covering Blackstreet’s “No ...
End of Watch: Partners Against Crime
Old-school good acting redeems this new-jack buddy cop thriller.KRISTIAN LIN
End of Watch is the third in a string of look-at-me-I’m-so-gritty dramas about Los Angeles cops directed by David Ayer. This one is different, partly because it’s shot in a found-footage style but mostly because it’s actu...
Master: Almighty Dodd
P.T. Anderson offers us cult comfort in this drama.KRISTIAN LIN
Bear with me here. I write this review a scant hour or so after watching Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, and like most of Anderson’s films, it tends to resist straightforward analysis. As with Anderson’s previous work,...
Arbitrage: High-Risk Bonds
A billionaire deals for his life in this frigid crime thriller.KRISTIAN LIN
One thing about New York City: In no other place on Earth are the very rich, the very poor, and everybody in between thrown together in such close quarters. The icy Arbitrage recognizes this to terrific effect. The proximity gi...
Bill W.: Demon Drink
AA’s founder is the subject of this complex, nuanced documentary.KRISTIAN LIN
The title of Bill W. refers to William G. Wilson, the former Wall Street securities analyst who lost his livelihood to alcoholism and the Great Depression and went on to found Alcoholics Anonymous. This documentary about his li...
Bachelorette: Maids of Dishonor
Horrid girls misbehave in this comedy, and you can’t look away.KRISTIAN LIN
Remember that post-Bridesmaids wave of ill-behaved female humor that I mentioned last week? It reaches high tide this week with Bachelorette, a comedy that is also about a bunch of bridesmaids and features one of the same actor...
Hollywood Words
There’s nothing particularly writerly about this bland psychological thriller.ZACK SHLACHTER
For a film about writers, The Words isn’t particularly well written. Scripted and directed by Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal, the movie features a familiar plotline: A struggling novelist stumbles on an unpublished manuscrip...
End-of-Summer Roundup
Assessing three low-budget indies before the fall movie season.KRISTIAN LIN
If you’ve been worn out by the summer blockbusters, now’s a good time to check out three low-budget films dropping in our multiplexes this weekend. None of them are masterpieces, but they’re all rewarding in small ways. S...
Symphonic Shorts
The FWSO’s players get solos in some short films online.KRISTIAN LIN
“As far as I know, we’re the first ones,” said Paul Unger. The 43-year-old bassist for the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra was referring to the series of short documentary films that he has made along with filmmaker Erik Cl...
Hit & Run: Dax a Lot
A Shepard leads his flock in this interesting, forgettable hybrid.KRISTIAN LIN
Dax Shepard became famous as one of Ashton Kutcher’s crew of pranksters on the now-defunct TV show Punk’d before settling into a career of playing loudmouthed jerks in middling-to-bad comedy films. (I haven’t seen him on ...