They toss a ball back and forth and dream of fleeing their small town to visit California, promising they’ll be “friends to the top,” and it’s the kind of intense bond best pals share when they’re tweens, before puberty hits and girls become a distraction.
“Deep Cover” is many things at once, including a quasi-male love story between Russell and David, a heated denunciation of capitalism and American imperialism, and ultimately a bitter critique of policing’s effect on Black cops once Russell begins resorting to murderous underworld practices. At its core, however, Duke’s exquisitely neon-lit film — a hard-boiled genre picture that’s carried by a banging hip-hop soundtrack, sees criminality in both the shadows plus the Solar, and keeps its unerring gaze focused around the intersection between noir and Blackness — is about the duality of id more than anything else.
This is all we know about them, however it’s enough. Because once they find themselves in danger, their loyalty to each other is what sees them through. At first, we don’t see who's got taken them—we just see Kevin being lifted from the trunk of a car or truck, and Bobby being left behind to kick and scream through the duct tape covering his mouth. Clever kid that He's, however, Bobby finds a means to break free and operate to safety—only to hear Kevin’s screams echoing from a giant brick house over the hill behind him.
Lately exhumed with the HBO series that saw Assayas revisiting the experience of making it (and, with no small degree of anxiety, confessing to its ongoing hold over him), “Irma Vep” is ironically the project that allowed Assayas to free himself from the neurotics of filmmaking and tap into the medium’s innate feeling of grace. The story it tells is an easy one, with endless complications folded within its film-within-a-film superstructure like the messages scribbled inside a baby’s paper fortune teller.
The emotions affiliated with the passage of time is a giant thing for that director, and with this film he was in the position to do in one night what he does with the sprawling temporal canvas of “Boyhood” or “Before” trilogy, as he captures many feelings at once: what it means to badwap generally be a freshman kissing a cool older girl because the sun rises, the sense of being jenna jameson a senior staring at the end of the party, and why the top of 1 important life stage can feel so aimless and Weird. —CO
tells the tale of gay activists inside the United Kingdom supporting a 1984 coal miners strike. It’s a movie filled with heart-warming solidarity that’s sure to receive you laughing—and thinking.
Adapted from Jeffrey Eugenides’s wistful novel and featuring voice-over narration lifted from its pages (read by Giovanni Ribisi), the film peers into the lives with the Lisbon sisters alongside a clique of neighborhood boys. Mesmerized because of the willowy young women — particularly Lux (Kirsten Dunst), the household coquette — the young gents study and surveil them with a way of longing that is by turns amorous and meditative.
A profoundly soulful plea for peace from the guise of straightforward family fare, “The Iron Giant” continues to stand tall as on the list of best and most philosophically complex American animated films ever made. Despite, Or maybe because from the movie’s power, its release was bungled from the start. Warner Bros.
A dizzying epic of reinvention, Paul Thomas Anderson’s seedy and sensational second film found the 28-year-previous directing with the swagger of a young porn star in possession of a massive
this fantastical take on Elton John’s story doesn’t straight-clean its subject’s intercourse life. Pair it with 1998’s Velvet Goldmine
Dripping streamsex in radiant assoass beauty by attractive young brunette aidra fox enjoys hardcore cinematographer Michael Ballhaus and Aged Hollywood grandeur from composer Elmer Bernstein, “The Age of Innocence” above all leaves you with a feeling of disappointment: not for the previous gone by, like so many time period pieces, but to the opportunities left un-seized.
There’s a purity towards the poetic realism of Moodysson’s filmmaking, which normally ignores the minimal-finances constraints of shooting at night. Grittiness becomes quite beautiful in his hands, creating a rare and visceral ease and comfort for his young cast and the lives they so naturally inhabit for Moodysson’s camera. —CO
“The Truman Show” will be the rare high concept movie that executes its eye-catching premise to absolute perfection. The concept of a man who wakes nearly learn that his entire life was a simulated reality show could have easily gone awry, but director Peter Weir and screenwriter Andrew Niccol managed to craft a plausible dystopian satire that has as much to say about our relationships with God mainly because it does our relationships with the Kardashians.
Annette Bening and Julianne Moore play the moms of two teenagers whose happy home life is thrown off-balance when their long-ago anonymous sperm donor crashes the party.