As much as I liked The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, I find it incredibly difficult to endorse because its strengths lie deep beneath its surface. Frequent filmmaking collaborators Hans Canosa and Gabrielle Zevin (Conversations with Other Women, Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac) have made an adaptation of Zevin’s novel of the same name that’s neither plot or character driven. Instead, just like a layered and schmaltzy book, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry has…
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.
There’s not much that can be said about recurring themes in Nicolas Winding Refn’s films that hasn’t been said before, but here’s a recap: self-indulgent, hyper violent, misogynist, pretentious, shallow.
By: Josh Chenoweth Lost River marks the directorial and writing debuts of actor Ryan Gosling, known for mainstream successes like The Notebook as well as critical darlings like Drive. After getting a less than pleasant response at Cannes in 2014, I was curious to see if Lost River was really all that bad. The answer: a resounding yes. Shot in a decaying suburb near Detroit (where else?), Lost River focuses on Billy (Christina Hendricks), a single…