When Ivan Locke (Tom Hardy) gets into his BMW and drives away, at the beginning of Locke, he puts his personal and professional lives into crisis. His destination is a hospital in London, about ninety minutes from his construction site, for a personal errand. Going there means taking the road less travelled, a righteous path, […]
Film Reviews
Here you will find every film review we've written. These include: festival films, new releases, and older films.
Hossein Amini’s The Two Faces of January kicks off SFIFF with style
The Two Faces of January kicked off the 2014 San Francisco International Film Festival with style, including a Q&A with writer-director Hossein Amini.
Review: Only Lovers Left Alive — vampires ain’t what they used to be
The lovers in Jim Jarmusch’s fantastic film, Only Lovers Left Alive, are Adam (Tom Hiddleston, excellent) and Eve (Tilda Swinton, fine), a sophisticated couple both in love with each other and with art and science. They’re also vampires, but they’re far from the emotionally stunted teenagers that tend to haunt the genre. This pair are […]
What to see and what to skip at the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF)
“Frank” **1/2 (Ireland) Director Lenny Abrahamson, who brought us the brilliant psychological drama What Richard Did, may not seem like the most likely candidate to make a comedy, but Frank” is a deftly handled, bizarre and charming comedy. Michael Fassbender plays the eponymous Frank, a talented musician whose main quirk is that he walks around […]
Review: In Breathe In, a foreign exchange student quickens the breath of a middle-aged man
Writer-director Drake Doremus’s new meditation on marital infidelity, Breathe In, is a puzzling combination of emotional resonance and frustratingly lazy, on-the-nose directing. When it works, it’s usually thanks to the strong performances of its leads, eighteen-year-old British exchange student Sophie (Felicity Jones, playing a character ten years younger than herself) and the dissatisfied high school […]
Review: Le Week-End is a late middle-age Before Midnight
Imagine picking up with Jesse and Celine of Before Midnight in their sixties, and you’ll get an idea of what’s in store in Le Week-End, Roger Michell’s intelligent new film about a middle-aged British couple spending a weekend in Paris. They are Meg (Lindsay Duncan), a teacher who is still gorgeous and vivacious at sixty-three, […]