Whiplash | Director Damien Chazelle | Score: 8.3 I had a conversation about this film before I got to see it with a friend of mine who couldn’t understand how a movie about a gifted student in a prestigious music…
A Place at the Table | Directors Kristi Jacobson & Lori Silverbush | Score: 6.3 If you’re feeling up to it, you could pretty effectively encapsulate the neglect this country heaps on its children via a punishing double-feature of societal…
Fantastic Four | Director Josh Trank | Score: 3.5 When superhero movies go wrong, they generally go wrong with their villains. Josh Trank’s ill-fated FF reboot certainly has that issue – in bloody spades — but that’s only the final…
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) | Director Alejandro González Iñárritu | Score: 7.7 When filmmakers make movies about theater, its generally to deconstruct the inherent artifice in the form, taking the audience backstage with gloomy actors peering into grungy…
The Guest | Director Adam Wingard | Score: 6.1 David Collins (Dan Stevens) seems like a pretty upstanding dude. Or he would if the film, with its ominous music, and shots of him in repose, sitting without blinking in the…
Fury | Director David Ayer | Score: 6.8 After more than two decades in the biz as one of the few remaining stars in the dwindling Hollywood constellation, Brad Pitt has taken on an increasingly rare additional aura. Because he…
Tracks | Director John Curran | Score: 6.1 The thing about doing something extraordinary is it’s going to sound utterly unreasonable at first. Back in 1977, when Robyn Davidson, a young, callow Aussie woman with a penchant for animals and…
Sin City: A Dame To Kill For | Director Robert Rodriguez & Frank Miller | Score: 4.3 You’ve got to give the Sin City franchise this much at least: It plays like a souped-up brand machine for its various well-known…
Into the Storm | Director Steven Quayle | Score: 4.7 If you think about it, there’s truly not much of a legacy to tarnish when it comes to Hollywood storm movies, at least over the past couple of decades. There’s…
Magic in the Moonlight | Director Woody Allen | Score: 3.5 It’s no secret that a lot of critics feel Woody lost his fastball a long time ago. The director, whose work began in the late ’60s as ribald (and…
