Review originally published at Awards Circuit during the Sundance Film Festival.
Kill Your Darlings is a perfect example of how one can tell a familiar story in a unique, fascinating way. Many are familiar with the Beats generation, but the way debut director Johnathan Krokidas and co-writer Austin Bunn see it you haven’t seen the definitive version of the tale till you see their film. Kill Your Darlings is a fascinating sojourn into the origin story of the Beats, kind of like The Avengers: Beats Edition set in the backdrop of the suffocating rigidity of 1944 Columbia University with a sharp script filled with an incredible social commentary. In short, it’s one of the best films I’ve seen so far at Sundance.
Review originally published during the SXSW Film Festival at Awards Circuit.
A Teacher, much like other films deal that with taboo subject matter, has the unenviable task of balancing the melodramatic aspects of the story as well as a need to justify every character’s motivations. And try though it may, it never seems to elevate itself from the basics of the story and the script moves from point A to point B without much in the way of shock. However, the tale is elevated by some incredibly nuanced acting from Lindsay Burdge and Will Brittain and just enough visual panache to keep the audience satisfied.
Though I love summer, it must be said that this year, summer felt like it was a million years long, with the films falling off in quality precipitously the longer the summer went on. Which is why I am happy that the fall movie season is upon us and if word out of Telluride is anything to go by, this is shaping up to be a doozy. So I decided to take a gander at the fall film slate and see what excited me. So without further ado, here all the fall films I’m most excited for and the empirical reasons why.
Did you all happen to be on the interwebs today and see the news about Aaron Paul, Sigourney Weaver and John Turturro are joining the cast of Ridley Scott’s Moses? If you are unfamiliar with this film Christian Bale is going to be playing the titular Moses and Joel Edgerton will be playing Ramses. Weaver and Turturro will be playing the parents of the pharaoh Ramses (Edgerton) and Paul is in negotiations to play Joshua, who leads the people onto the promised land. Now when you see the actors selected, you totally envision ancient Egypt right?
We are so close to Oscar season really starting in earnest. Venice and Telluride begin this week and Toronto is only a week and a half away, followed by New York Film Festival. So that meant it was time to give the Oscar Predictions the old update. Given that there has been so much movement with category changes and pictures entering the race, it was harder to update these Oscar predictions than I thought it would be but here goes nothing.
When I walked out of my screening for Lee Daniels’ The Butler, I was sure that I had seen a good movie. It’s probably why I wrote such a rave review over at Awards Circuit. However, the film has grown in estimation over the past few days to be one of the more impressive films in recent memory that dealt with issues in the African-American community. Black issues in films are very difficult to tackle on-screen, partially due to the fact that everyone is so used to the white heteronormative narrative. But I thought it would be nice to give kudos to Lee Daniels’ The Butler and analyze why it worked so well.