Reviews »
Oslo, August 31st
Oslo, August 31st follows Anders (Anders Danielsen Lie), a recovering drug addict, through a 24-hour period, beginning on August 30th and creeping into the early morning of the 31st, as per the film’s title,
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Beyond the Black Rainbow
The most popular bit of Drive’s sparse dialogue among reviewers last year was Albert Brooks’ gangster describing his equally seedy past life as a maker of B-pictures. “I used to produce movies. In the
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Small, Beautifully Moving Parts
Small, Beautifully Moving Parts begins by introducing the viewer to Sarah Sparks (Anna Margaret Hollyman) as she puts up flyers advertising her services as a “freelance technologist” and interviews people idling in the park
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Polisse
It goes without saying that the subject matter of Polisse is dispiriting and heartbreaking: a group of police officers working for the Child Protection Unit (or CPU) in Paris deal, on a daily basis,
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Nobody Else But You
The French have long been obsessed with America’s great pulp writers, identifying as they did with Hollywood cinema’s greatest intersection with the literary genre, film noir. But the bulk of France’s romantic entanglement with
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Elena
Family has a complex, inexorable pull on a person. Devotion to loved ones can persist beyond the easily defined borders of logic and drive someone to make choices that might otherwise strike them as
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The Dictator
Comedy is a genre of diminishing returns, where anything that was fertile ground once isn’t necessarily always so. Sacha Baron Cohen knows this better than most, as his rise to comedic stardom initially saw
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I Wish
Another children’s movie that isn’t really about children, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s I Wish employs its child actors in service of a tenderly sad parable about acceptance. It’s also finally attuned to the emotional power of
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Sleepless Night
Frédéric Jardin’s Sleepless Night is a harrowing film — its main character Vincent (Tomer Sisley) suffers from a stab wound on his abdomen for nearly its entire duration, which doubles as the physical equivalent
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God Bless America
God Bless America has its crooked heart in the right place; too bad it’s so inept it can’t do anything about it. America is rotting at its core. Pundits shout at one another on
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