Author: Nathan Raine
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JEANNE DIELMAN or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Boredom
Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is one of the most challenging, celebrated films in history. Also, boring. But boring isn’t always bad. The average North American watches an average of 304 minutes of television per day. That’s 2,128 per week, 9,120 per month, and 110,960 per year. With televisions passively glanced at…
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10 Good Movies with Bad IMDB Ratings
Imdb is great for information on a production; it’s a garbage fire from a critical perspective. Here are some great movies with low imdb ratings. A while back, the Internet Movie Database (imdb) removed its user boards from the site, which was a clearing out of some of the internet’s most prolific amateur movie banter.…
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The Red Turtle
Japan’s Studio Ghibli collaberate with Dutch animator and director Michael Dudok de Wit to bring us a minimal but affecting story with The Red Turtle. Known for its austere visual style and lyrical fables, Japan’s Studio Ghibli is perhaps the world’s most respected animation studio — and certainly the most refined in their rigorously detailed…
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High-Rise
Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise, based on the ‘unfilmable’ JG Ballard novel, is a boldly realized vision and a biting, knowing comment on where capitalism takes us. High-Rise opens with the monstrous concrete luxury tower invoked by the film’s title. The tower’s cascading top floors look as if the structure was designed to topple over — we…
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Everybody Wants Some!!
Everybody Wants Some!! is director Richard Linklater’s spiritual sequel to his classic end of high school movie, Dazed and Confused. Does the movie hold up? It’s late summer of 1980, and with the new semester drawing uncomfortably close, campus is germinating with young people desperate to escape sobriety and responsibility in their last few days…
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The Revenant
Controversial shooting methods seem to have paid off for director Alejandro Iñárritu, with his new film The Revenant. Maybe we’ll see an Oscar for Leo? What once spat venom, the saggy orifice of Hollywood is now, almost uniformly, discharging a steady glob of watery bile. Those most insipid, perhaps, are the action and adventure films.…
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The Big Short
The Big Short is getting big praise. But is it a hackneyed film that tries too hard to riff on The Wolf of Wall Street? “Okay, Chris. Pretty sure this guy has Asperger’s or something. So, I need you to let the audience know within the first three seconds just how very, very autistic he…
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Nathan’s Top 10 Films of 2015
It’s the time of year for best of lists, so film writer Nathan Raine takes a look at his top ten movies of the 2015. 10) Tangerine (Dir: Sean Baker) Despite a smattering of critical acclaim following its Sundance debut, it took a long time before I got around to this one. Admittedly, it wasn’t…
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The Lobster
Yorgos Lanthimos, director of wildly offbeat films like Dogtooth and Alps, explores the things we do for love in his new work The Lobster. As a general rule, making films like this, films which are both conceptually absurd and deliberately alienating to the audience, shouldn’t be encouraged. An artist employing this kind of conceited approach…
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Victoria
Victoria, the new film from German filmmaker Sebastian Schipper, is so ambitious that it’s all one shot — but does ambition that excuse its flaws? Does a formidable execution of a high concept necessarily absolve any of the related flaws along the way? I have no idea. But an answer to that question might determine…