Edited for Clarity
A sense of constant and fertile discovery abounds in Mike Leigh’s mid-period classic Life is Sweet, a superior film to many of his more famous mid-‘90s concoctions (the also sharp, if more contentious, Naked and the universally adored Secrets and Lies). Less high-concept and less obviously prefigured to arrive at specific narrative cues, Life is Sweet is arguably the most recent Leigh film to embody the fullest spirit of his uniquely personalized style of horizontal storytelling: cinema where moments intermingle and rest on each other rather than linearly hurtling to narrative completion. Restful and relaxing it may seem, but a perilously challenging vision of life lurks within it, like an insurgent into the usually trifling, domesticated, prepackaged realm of narrative storytelling. In Leigh’s films, the meaning flows out of idiomatic gestures we must acclimatize to rather than being overlit for us to see in broad daylight. Thus, Life is Sweet refrains from doubling-down on meaning with any kind of apocalyptic import. Ostensibly a more reticent, nonexistent style, it is a significantly more devious, conflicted, complicated tale precisely for how it refuses to overstate its case. Continue reading
Compared to “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang for The Nice Guys”, “Ocean’s Eleven for Money Monster” isn’t as clean a comparison. But I really like Soderbergh’s collaboration with George Clooney, Julia Roberts, and mindless excess, and clearly Clooney and Roberts enjoyed themselves too; Money Monster reteams them and brings a different kind of capital along for the ride.
This one just writes itself. Writer-director Shane Black is back with another buddy comedy, so let us look at his last one, a return to form after nearly two decades of wallowing in nihilism, misogyny, and eventually, oblivion.
Both unhurried and nimble, Richard Linklater’s beguiling concoction of breathless immaturity and stunted, off-hand maturity worships an altar of “just one more midnight hang-sesh doing nothing in particular”, an event that is elevated in import within Everybody Wants Some!! precisely because of how acquainted with the passing nature of youth the film seems to be. The film’s aimless, untamed, rowdy structure of bedlam-before-linearity cheerfully replicates the constant blood rush of avoiding your future that embodies the daily lexicon of the Southeast Texas State University baseball squad of 1980. But they aren’t the event-instigating, virile, social-agent protagonists of the tale so much as the byproducts of social tumult and the circumstantial nature of chance. Accused of a sort of masculine bro-ish bravado in some circles, and not inaccurately I might add, Linklater’s film is also notable for how painfully it recognizes how deeply unspecial its main characters are. 
Ilya Naishuller’s celebration and extension of, as well as slight rebellion against, pinball-scripted action cinema storytelling charitably accentuates, and lambasts, the genre it calls home by curdling it down to its most primordial essences devoid of meaningful context or narrative: dude, gun, fire, pandemonium, nonsense, more gun. Smitten with its playfully trivial nature and keen on its own exclusively, even exclusionary, surface-level ambitions, Naishuller’s first-person camera is a little like a Looney Tunes version of cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki’s recent achievements behind the camera, even if it isn’t nearly as full-throated or as perceptive in its utilization of the faux-long-take lexicon as anything Lubezki might have in the works. Hardcore Henry certainly deserves credit for perspiration, occasionally for exhilaration, and once or twice for genuine innovation. 
With four major-ish video game adaptations arriving in the cinema this year (something of a resurgence after the trend died off a half-decade ago), let us recollect our memories of two films from 2010, the inflection point of the video game adaptation as it was just entering its death throes the first time. We will eschew actual video game adaptations (they’re pretty worthless, relatively speaking) for two films that attempt to peruse the abstract idea of the video game as a jumping-off point instead.
With the TMNT reboot-sequel releasing soon, reviews are out and – shock – not appealing in the slightest. Here’s a look back at, low standards for the franchise kept close to the chest in this statement, what remains the best filmic adaptation of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic/cartoon/media empire.
Death Becomes Her
British indie darling Ben Wheatley has made a living for himself electro-shocking the ostensibly comatose world of cinematic death, parceling out and sowing the seeds of a strip of filmic land that is necrotic and cadaverous but never embalmed or lifeless. His films are death-marked but not deadened. Now on his fifth film, his masterpiece remains his 2011 effort Kill List, a modern reworking of the quintessential British horror film The Wicker Man. Until this point, that 1973 work has doubled as a sort of spiritual guiding light for Wheatley, who has by and large drawn himself to the lurking terrors in the pastoral rather than those which creep into the mental cogs and emotional rivets of automatized modern society. 
The Long Take 