Update (and edited score) 2018, on the eve of Roma’s release: It’s impossible as ever to ignore Cuaron’s signal audio-visual achievements with Gravity, but I find myself even colder on the film’s ability to connect the dots between charting our outer space, which it does so well, and truly destabilizing our inner space, a task on which it essentially punts entirely.
Original Review:
I’ve never seen a film quite like Gravity. On one hand, it’s a thrill ride to end all thrill rides, never letting up in subjecting its characters to situations from bad to worse during its slim but breathless 90 minute running length. Gravity is nerve-wrecking in a purely visual way that few films aim to be. This is a true edge-of-your-seat motion picture. But it’s much more than that too. Gravity is a film which tries to challenge what film can be on a technical level. Moreover, it tries to transform our understanding and appreciation of Earth and its surroundings visually while also playing to populist sensibilities and trying to earn its large budget back by showcasing destruction and visual splendor on a level beyond any other film of 2013. It’s 2001: A Space Odyssey meets Star Wars, and you’d be forgiven for thinking these two goals are incompatible, but more on that later. For now, I will simply say here that, for those simply looking for “the next big thing” in film technology, Gravity has anything else handily beat. This is a visually bold, singular, uncompromising film that will be remembered as a game-changer many years in the future. That it also happens to be quite good is just the icing on the cake. Continue reading
The Master is many things, but the only safe and sure descriptor I can come up with is “mis-marketed”. Explored pre-release, it was a film about L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology. Indeed, Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s Lancaster Dodd is a facsimile of L. Ron Hubbard, and one can certainly draw comparisons to the much-maligned religion (some would not agree with calling it that). But Anderson’s film is not only about Dodd or the “cultlike” group he leads. It’s a much more ambitious, confounding affair, highly impersonal, yet enrapturing. Technically it centers around a religious cult, but focusing on this controversial aspect of the film does it a grave disservice. On the plus side, it allows me this one measly paragraph to save myself from not saying anything I feel confident about throughout the review. This comment about the mis-marketing of the film ends the part of the review where I’m relatively sure I agree with what I’m writing – the rest of the film, as I think Anderson wants, is me entering the wild and hoping to come out the other side. 
The Social Network proves one thing clearly: the internet is a dangerous place. Many people are aware of the dangers which afflict people using the internet, but few are aware of the consequences of creating an internet site, most of which derive from the simple fact that many sites, like seemingly everything else in the world, are businesses. And like many businesses, they’re prone to be run by egotistical, asocial madmen in human clothes who desire, above all, to shape society to their own terms when they may have had trouble fitting in to its. Due to this, the internet can lead to great riches as well as a number of far more devastating and de-humanizing effects, and The Social Network, the excellent David Fincher-directed adaptation of Ben Mezrich’s The Accidental Billionaires, deals with both sides of the coin in a fascinating, invigorating, and often scary manner. 
Edited
Fundamentally, I like The Raid more than the The Raid 2. The former film was more assured and confident in achieving its stated goals. It was lean, mean, efficient, and it boiled action filmmaking down to its brutal basics while elevating the genre to a ballet of human motion and brutality. It was about construction, form, filmmaking, and camera movement above any conception of character or narrative, and it was entirely aware of this.
One would suspect that all a romance needs to do to succeed is give you two characters who are likable, giving the audience a reason to care about them so that, in the end, the audience’s interest lies in seeing them come together and decide they were meant for each other, or something as gushy as all that. Most romances can’t even accomplish this, and, unfortunately, many of the ones that can aren’t capable of taking those characters and moving us from sympathy for them into empathy. This is what truly moves romance beyond good and into the realm of greatness, and this is what Blue Valentine has in anguished, blood-and-dirt-covered spades. Because of this, the two central characters and the problems they face ache with life-blood, and the movie is a powerful, effective and affecting, if profoundly intense to watch, experience. 
Edited
Dreamworks Animation, long lambasted as a second-tier Pixar Studios, kind of came out of nowhere with How to Train your Dragon in 2010. They’d made plenty of good films before, but their bread-and-butter was slapstick comedy and verbal punnery and didn’t hold a candle to the subtle artfulness and nuanced emotion of their competitor’s finest. Perhaps luckily for them, HtTyD came out at the dawn of Pixar’s currently, and sadly, still continuing descent into competence. Although it’s faced competition from Disney’s assumed new second-silver age , these Disney films haven’t yet touched the elegant grandeur and beauty of How to Train your Dragon, the second best mainstream animated film of the decade after Pixar’s decade-beginning (or decade-capping) masterpiece Toy Story 3. As a result of its success, it was almost impossible not to believe in the likelihood of future sequels, and, although the company took longer than expected for it to be released, a sequel is here as expected. The rule of thumb would suggest inferiority, but let’s not jump to conclusions. 
The Long Take 