Posts Tagged ‘movie reviews’
Super Looper
This sci-fi thriller will wow you, then go back in time and wow you again.KRISTIAN LIN
You can’t accuse Rian Johnson of lacking ambition. Best known for his polarizing debut film, the 2006 high-school noir picture Brick, Johnson has come up rapidly through low-budget indie cinema. His third film, Looper, is his...
Film Shorts
KRISTIAN LINOPENING: Compliance (R) This film by Craig Zobel (Great World of Sound) is about a mysterious prank caller who induces a fast-food outlet manager (Ann Dowd) to inflict a series of humiliations on her employee (Dreama Walker). A...
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...
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 ...
Timothy Green: Autumn Leaves
A kid grows from a garden in this strange, uneven fable.KRISTIAN LIN
The word “odd” is entirely appropriate in the title of The Odd Life of Timothy Green. This family-oriented movie has the bad luck to come to us just one week after Ruby Sparks, another magic-realist fable about a person who...