2014 Sundance Film Festival
MOVIE REVIEW
Young Ones (2014)
Some time in the near future, arty teenager Jerome (Kodi Smit-McPhee) lives on a remote farm with his sister Mary (Elle Fanning) and their father Ernest (Michael Shannon). Water is a resource more precious than gold. It hardly ever rains anymore; and the land has always been — in Jerome’s lifetime — a desert. Ernest is a good man, willing to help out the locals and share what little he has, but who is unafraid to kill marauding strangers who threaten his family. The closest threat, of course, comes from Mary’s boyfriend Flem (Nicholas Hoult).
Continue reading “The Life Desertic” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Let Me In (2010)
Saeed Adyani/Overture Films
A swell of cacophony overwhelms most horror movies — an overwrought, heavily amplified soundscape of screaming, earsplitting terror. “Let Me In,” which deserves immediate comparison with the genre’s all-time classics, opts for a different approach. Matt Reeves’s remake of last year’s superb Swedish film “Let the Right One In” generates its terror in silence amid falling snow, in a world aglow with the yellowed haze of streetlamps permanently dimmed.
Continue reading “Love at Second Bite” »
MOVIE REVIEW
The Road (2009)
Macall Polay/2929/Dimension Films
John Hillcoat’s book-to-film adaptation “The Road” does everything it can to repel. The cinematography — while quite remarkable — is layered in grime, depicting a landscape decimated after unexplained destruction. The very few actors seen in the film (prominently Viggo Mortensen and newcomer Kodi Smit-McPhee) look distressed throughout, smeared in dirt and unrelenting desperation. A somber, bleak story of a father’s undying love for his son in the face of hopelessness, “The Road” even comes equipped with images of a pistol pressed against a little boy’s forehead and a father washing a man’s brains out of his son’s hair.
Continue reading “Once Upon a Time of the Wolf” »