The Assassin – 2015

The Wuxia genre is fairly commonplace in Chinese cinema. The Assassin is a pretty standard martial arts film, but it offers some interesting filming techniques. Hou Hsiao-hsien uses minimal action and minimal dialogue, but his story tells an interesting tale nonetheless. He films through windows and entryways. He plants the camera and waits for the action […]

Genre: Science Fiction Films

Science I go back to work on Friday, but I’ve been thinking a lot about science in my time and about how some of the most commonplace things, such as hurricanes, must seem like impossible imaginings to people of the past. The sci-fi genre has evolved a lot in the last century and some films […]

Manchester by the Sea – 2016

Pain is real. Acting isn’t. It takes a truly gifted actor to make an audience believe that the agony on the screen is real. Casey Affleck has never been on the radar as an extraordinary actor, but I am happy to be proven wrong. He pours his life force into this role and it shows […]

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs – 1937

There is no argument that Walt Disney invented the animated film. It wasn’t the first, but it certainly set the standard to which every other animated film aspired. The story is simple and the voice cast is insignificant, but the simplistic beauty of the film lies in its art. Before this film there were limits […]

Frances Ha – 2012

There are some movies that are just awkward. It doesn’t prevent them from being good, it just makes them a little harder to watch. Frances Ha is one of those movies. Greta Gerwig gives a powerful performance as the perpetually struggling Frances and Noah Baumbach never feels like he’s at a loss in directing her […]

Blind Chance – 1987

Kieślowski is a master of human nature. In Blind Chance, he takes a man grieving over the death of his father and send him to catch a train. It is here that the story diverges into three separate sequences. Each one is unique and each one exploits the grief of the protagonist into doing something […]