Abbey Lee

Reviews

Lux Æterna

I’ll be reviewing Gaspar Noé’s Vortex very soon, and I wanted to use the filmmaker’s latest short Lux Æterna as a gateway to his latest feature.  I’m a fan of Noé’s polarizing work from what I’ve seen (Irreversible, Enter The Void), but his latest projects utilize a split-screen technique I haven’t seen him play around with before.  As a provocateur, the writer/director has been know to explore and experiment with “gratuitous filmmaking”.  It’s overkill for…

Reviews

Office Christmas Party

It’s business as usual for Office Christmas Party, the latest exercise in R-rated edginess being applied to an otherwise toothless situation.  Audiences may have been given a dose of this same seasonal comedy in Bad Santa 2, but a more relevant comparison is between Office Christmas Party and 2011’s A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas.

Reviews

The Neon Demon

Nicolas Winding Refn makes something out of nothing with his subversive satire The Neon Demon.  Most movies do the same, but Refn’s latest grabs ahold of seemingly vacuous source material and manages to build a world within it where decisions are outrageously vain and scary but oddly comprehensible.