Annabelle: Creation ★★★½ Now playing On a recent library whim, I picked up an anthology of contemporary horror stories—nominees for the annual Bram Stoker Award for short fiction, I think it was. It was a very nice surprise, actually. Fans of the genre will be happy to hear that innovative and sophisticated horror is alive […]
Glenn McDonald
Posted inFilm & Television
Obvious Child’s Gillian Robespierre and Jenny Slate Reunite for Landline, an Ode to Nineties Anxiety and Optimism
LANDLINE Opening Friday, August 4 Younger readers might not be aware of this, but the nineties were awesome. A Clinton in the White House, a budget surplus, no wars, no smartphones, and the best music since the sixties. This isn’t an opinion, I’m afraid. It’s a fact. The nineties were the best. Set in the […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Maudie Celebrates the Light of Creativity and the Indefatigable Folk Artist Maud Lewis
MAUDIE Now playing It’s no secret that we’re living through some of America’s darkest days right now. The shadow in D.C. looms like the darkness over Mordor, and I don’t bust out the apocalyptic Tolkienisms lightly. So we should take our candles against the darkness wherever we can find them. Maudie, the Canadian biographical drama […]
Posted inFilm & Television
H.P. Lovecraft Meets Art House Cinema in the Odd, Ominous A Ghost Story
A GHOST STORY Opening Friday, July 28 “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” That’s H.P. Lovecraft, inventor of the modern horror story, who had a debilitating preoccupation with the essential cosmic terror of existence in an unknowable universe. “We live […]
Posted inCulture
Movie Review: Despicable Me 3 Shows Signs of a Franchise Wearing Thin, but Your Kids Won’t Mind, Because Minions!
Despicable Me 3★★½ Now playing There’s an old Hollywood story about Buster Keaton and animated movies. Apparently, the first time he saw cartoons on the silver screen, he nearly quit show business altogether. He immediately saw that he couldn’t compete with the kind of physical comedy animation made possible. No matter how many elaborate stunts […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Know More About Manhattan Than Your Embattled Neighbors in Rural North Carolina? Then See Raising Bertie.
RAISING BERTIE Saturday, July 1 & Sunday, July 2, 1:45 p.m. The Chelsea Theater, Chapel Hill www.thechelseatheater.com The independent documentary Raising Bertie, filmed in fits and starts over the course of six years, is essentially a coming-of-age movie. Shot in Bertie County, in the rural, eastern part of North Carolina, the film tracks the lives […]
Posted inFilm & Television
In Her Remake of Clint Eastwood’s Lurid, Trashy The Beguiled, Sofia Coppola Probes Deeper Rhythms
THE BEGUILED Opening Friday, June 30 Sofia Coppola’s new historical drama, The Beguiled, turns on an intriguing setup: in the waning days of the Civil War, a wounded Union soldier happens upon a girls boarding school deep in the woods of confederate Virginia. In the spirit of Christian charity, the women take him in. With […]
Posted inCulture
Movie Review: Letters from Baghdad’s Experimental Approach Doesn’t Entirely Work, but Its Subject, Gertrude Bell, Still Fascinates
Letters from Baghdad★★★ ½ Chelsea Theatre, Chapel Hill Describable only as an experimental documentary, Letters from Baghdad tells the story of Gertrude Bell, the British government official, explorer, and occasional spy who helped draw the borders of modern-day Iraq in the years after the first world war. Bell is sometimes called the female Lawrence of […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Eleanor Coppola’s Beautiful Imagery Is Better Than Paris Can Wait’s Thin Story of One Percenters in Mild Crisis
Paris Can Wait Opening Friday, June 16 Very pretty and very slight, Paris Can Wait is the first narrative feature directed by Eleanor Coppola, the eighty-one-year-old photographer and documentary filmmaker who is married to Francis Ford Coppola. Diane Lane stars as Anne, the wife of a busy Hollywood filmmaker, and there’s a scent of autobiography […]
Posted inCulture
Movie Review: The Mummy Gets Resurrected in a Middling Reboot
The Mummy ★★ ½ stars Now playing At some point in the past twenty years, Tom Cruise transcended personhood as we know it to become a kind of media-age hybrid of human being and Hollywood brand. Surely the most extreme show business construct ever assembled, Cruise is like a piece of brilliantly optimized cinematic firmware. […]
