Screen
reel to reel | Week of July 12, 2012
ABRAHAM LINCOLN: VAMPIRE HUNTER No more sensitive, sparkly vampires — Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter takes bloodsuckers back to their grisly origins as terrifying monsters. In the film’s universe, Southern slave owners are vampires, and President Lincoln is the one...
Sherlock Holmes minus the mystery
While I enjoyed the 2009 Guy Ritchie reinvention of the fabled detective in Sherlock Holmes, applying the same formula in this newer film Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows proved more a boring, tedious exercise in special effects and self-conscious filmmaking and ...
You’ll need a Haneke
Oh, hell no. Why you gotta do us like that, writer/director Michael Haneke? Is life not already emotionally dense enough that you have to go and drop Amour on us just to remind us how finite and precious this human experience is? This is the sort of film you don’t ...
BW BIFF Picks 2013: ‘The New Public’
In Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, the high school graduation rate is 40 percent. The New Public, a documentary by Jyllian Gunther, tells the story of a small group of high school teachers and administrators who tackle that problem by opening a small ...
Object of my Affleck-tion
It’s easy to thrill people when they don’t know what’s coming. OK, maybe not easy — paging Mr. Shyamalan — but certainly less difficult than whipping up tension in a film based on a decades-old actual incident, the resolution of which is but a Google search away. ...
Freaky Frequency
For a movie reviewer, having a favorite genre kinda feels like a parent having a favorite child; oh, they totally do, they’re just not supposed to talk about it. Well, just like your mom told your sister when you were out of earshot, if all other genres were out of ...
