Excerpt: One of the smart things about Green’s screenplay and direction is its quiet subtlety. There is no one big moment here, nor an outright smoking gun, instead a steady build of small injustices…
Excerpt: ‘The Assistant’ is a real-life horror docudrama portraying a young woman made to feel helpless to stop the daily abuses of power she witnesses.
Excerpt: The Assistant stares at a recent college grad’s first real-world moral dilemma – what will you do when your black and white ethics lessons confront the gray areas of innuendo, the behavior of powerful men, and the inevitability of personal consequences should you challenge the system.
Excerpt: Green wants us to experience the silent prison of knowing the truth and being helpless against it. A palpable, tense drama exists beyond the mundane day-to-day of all victims.
Excerpt: Solidly telling in its methodical truth, Green’s film is unassumingly dazzling in its low-key observations. The Assistant is impressively potent without the overstated exclamation of acrimony.
Excerpt: …the film’s themes of Christian guilt don’t amount to much in the end, its climax more of a been-there, done-that deflation. “The Lodge” gets more mileage out of a creepy bowl of sea monkeys in a clear case of style over substance.
Excerpt: The filmmakers know how to set a mood, and while the story is engaging in the moment, especially with Riley Keough’s performance, it doesn’t have much lasting impact.
Excerpt: Led by a strikingly gloomy performance from Riley Keough, ‘The Lodge’ uses the power of psychological warfare and brutal natural elements to spook up a dark cabin fever horror story that refuses to let up.
Excerpt: What was left ambiguous and threatening in the original here is flatly stated or weakly joked upon, like this film’s literal dumping of its ending.
Excerpt: …quiet and pensive with an undertow of melancholic regret and a light topping of comic relief all set to Robert Glasper’s elegant jazz score. Issa Rae and Lakeith Stanfield create a tentative romance, its unspoken emotions simmering into a full boil.
Excerpt: Behold ladyrage given full candy-colored, sparkle-sprinkled voice in an ironically comical spectacle: Haha, isn’t this delightfully absurd? Or is it? This is kidding-not-kidding on celluloid.
Excerpt: Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn), as it is gloriously titled, answers the ancient cinematic question: What if Suicide Squad hadn’t been godawful?
Excerpt: By letting action and comedy become augmentation for its underlying crime caper, it proves more character-driven romp a la Snatch than another ploddingly edgelord blockbuster.
Excerpt: The Czech Republic’s Daria Kashcheeva’s stop motion puppet animation is the first of three stop motion animations to be nominated, each using a different medium… This is my pick for the Oscar.
Excerpt: Dysinger’s uplifting look at how women are finding poor young girls in Kabul and giving them…courage and confidence by teaching them how to skateboard, Is an infectious and uplifting work which I’m betting will take the Oscar.
Excerpt: Tunisia is the setting for two of this year’s Live Action shorts in film, one a searing drama beneath the shadow of ISIS, the other a comedy involving a mule listening to the wrong music…
Excerpt: My pick: I haven’t seen a short film this year that is as full of pure joy as “Hair Love.” I’d like to think that its sweet positivity will be the thing that, at this awful moment, gives it an edge.
Excerpt: My pick: “Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (If You’re a Girl),” a tremendous ode to the power of sports to boost girls’ self-esteem and set them free from the shackles of the limited expectations.
Excerpt: My pick: The gorgeous “Brotherhood” opens up reductive notions of Middle Eastern cultures in the Western imagination while telling a moving story of family and forgiveness that is quite universal.
Excerpt: This year’s Doc Short nominees share common themes even though they range from skateboarding girls in Afghanistan to the South Korean ferry disaster and even a Ferguson, Missouri state legislator.
Excerpt: All masterfully made, this year’s Oscar nominated Animated Short Films address emotional topics and issues that bridge the gap between fantasy and reality.
Excerpt: Tissues at the ready, this year’s slate of Oscar nominated Documentary Short Subject films are important, topical works of impassioned conviction that are hard to shake and ride a rollercoaster of emotions.
Excerpt: This year’s Oscar nominees for Best Live Action Short Film represent stories told from around the world, but all unify around the power of human interaction, no matter your age or where you come from.
Excerpt: Poor Blake Lively does her de-glammed best in this poor Xerox of much better Turn The Urchin Into A Spy thrillers. But there isn’t a single human interaction in this hamfisted movie that rings true.
Excerpt: Director Reed Morano adeptly conveys grime and confronting a soul full of garbage, but the needlessly complicated plot does nothing to separate her film from any other ‘revenge is tricky’ story.
Excerpt: …[a] drawn-out action drama in search of its staged contemplative mojo. Sadly, The Rhythm Section sings an all-too-familiar tune in terms of its labored “harried heroine seeking revenge mode”.
Excerpt: It’s leisurely pacing might be too much for some, but there wasn’t a single moment where I wasn’t admiring something on the screen, be it a performance, the sets, the score, a thematic idea, or the composition of a certain shot.
Excerpt: …a visually arresting but tepid tailspin. Evidently, Gretel and Hansel are not the only ones that are led astray among the whispery woods in this uninvolving fractured fairy tale.
Excerpt: It’s pure classic Guy Ritchie, for better and for worse. Despite some flaws, the film is entertaining, but you wish Ritchie could grow more as a filmmaker.
Excerpt: While the opening half of this film lacks some of the clever grit of Ritchie’s earlier offerings, it slowly gets into the groove before going full-tilt with falling bodies, meaningful threats and classic gun play.
Excerpt: Guy Ritchie ups his game on his signature subgenre with a hilariously sublime crime comedy that acts as mirror on the legit world and oozes with crackling cynicism about culture and politics as well.
Excerpt: For every top notch set-piece comes two or three moments of misguided exposition dumping that lean on lazy jokes and verbose dialogue to screech any momentum gained to a halt.
Excerpt: Witty, funny, and more well-rounded than his previous efforts, Guy Ritchie delivers in The Gentlemen his most complete and – dare I say – moving film.
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