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| EFC STATS |
| Movies Listed: |
32556 |
| Total Ratings: |
249495 |
| Total Reviews: |
28800 |
![[200423162 Hits]](/cgi-bin/gd.cgi?200423162)
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| SAINT MAUD |
"Another art-house horror calling card."
Rob Gonsalves says... "Every couple of years, a little oddity emerges from the indie-cinema beat and gets lionized as the next great thing to happen to horror. Generally these films are scrupulously calibrated and express the drive and obsession that a young filmmaker — in this case, Rose Glass, a British writer-director about thirty — feels about a story or a theme. What they don’t express is true fear." (more)
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| TENET |
"Ride, captain, ride..."
Rob Gonsalves says... "There’s a guy, brave and smart. We’ll call him the good guy. Watch now as we point him in the direction of the bad guy. The bad guy wants to make everything die. Why? Because he’s the bad guy. The good guy, being the good guy, must stop the bad guy." (more)
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| JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH |
"An American Tale"
Peter Sobczynski says... "In the late 1960s, Fred Hampton was, in the eyes of the F.B.I., one of the most dangerous men in America. With his galvanizing combination of righteous anger and fierce rhetoric, he spoke out against racism, poverty and other social ills and preached a form of social revolution that inspired and united groups of people that would never have otherwise come together and challenged the existing power structure and those ruled over it. Hampton’s rise and the increasingly elaborate efforts by the government to bring him down by any means necessary are at the center of “Judas and the Black Messiah,” Shaka King’s mesmerizing docudrama that not only expertly brings to life an almost unbelievable sliver of recent American history but makes it relevant to the turbulent times that we currently live in as well." (more)
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| NOMADLAND |
"An American Tale"
Peter Sobczynski says... "I must confess that I was not particularly eager to sit down and watch “Nomadland” when the opportunity first presented itself last fall. This, I should point out, was not meant as a slight towards either writer-director Chloe Zhao, whose “The Rider” was justifiably celebrated when it came out a couple of years ago, or star Frances McDormand, whose bona fides hopefully require no further explanation. No, it was the film’s premise that set me off a bit. To hear reduced to a couple of sentences, it sounds like one of those films about people trying to come to terms with things that are as noble as can be but which ultimately prove to be a bit of a chore to sit through—the kind of film that one admires more than actually enjoys. Of course, the combination of professional obligation and its early status as a potential leader in the current award season ensured that I would put my misgivings aside and finally sit sown and watch it. I am glad that I did because rather than the well-meaning stiff that I feared it might be, it proved to be one of the year’s most engrossing and thought-provoking films featuring one of the very best performances to boot." (more)
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| NOMADLAND |
"Hits a spot that few movies seldom even see."
Jay Seaver says... "For as much good reason as there is not to go to theaters right now, there's some small consolation in how it gives something like "Nomadland" some time on a multiplex's Imax screen that it would not normally be afforded with new blockbusters coming out weekly. It's beautifully shot, yes, but seeing it like that makes it all-enveloping, and seeing it after a month and a half of theaters not being open reminds one how a movie built for immersion can hit differently when not limited to the size of one's TV." (more)
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| SUPERNOVA (2021) |
"Less about the explosion than the contraction that comes before."
Jay Seaver says... "The title of "Supernova" gives the game away if you know your astronomy, but this is not a film about surprising you so much as getting you settled in for the inevitable, so that's fine. It's bucolic in its way, contrasting cozy spaces with lovely landscapes, letting the small cast enjoy each other so that the audience can enjoy them as well." (more)
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| MALCOLM & MARIE |
"Contempt"
Peter Sobczynski says... "The ads for “Malcolm & Marie” present it as being “from visionary director Sam Levinson,” a declaration that seems a little bold considering that a.) he has only two other films to his name and b.) the last one, “Assassination Nation” was as embarrassingly bad as anything that has hit movie screens in recent memory. Under normal circumstances, such a claim would send me scurrying for the hills but since Levinson’s project in between the two films, the controversial HBO series “Euphoria,” has proven to be undeniably fascinating and since this new film reunites him with that show’s star, Zendaya, and pairs her up with the equally electrifying John David Washington, to boot, I found myself eager to what the three conjured up in virtual secrecy under pandemic conditions. Unfortunately, whatever anticipation I may have had was pretty much completely stripped away within the first ten minutes or so and replaced by the steadily mounting fear that I was watching a work so dramatically inert and self-absorbed that it might leave me thinking that perhaps “Assassination Nation” was not that bad after all. While it doesn’t quite get that dire, my guess is that few people will be willing to stick it out to the very end unless they are absolute masochists or simply enjoy watching Zendaya lounge around in her underwear." (more)
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| 4X4 |
"A.K.A. Parasite By The Dashboard Light"
Peter Sobczynski says... "Larry Cohen, for those of you unfamiliar with him, was a maverick American independent filmmaker who specialized in dreaming up outrageous cinematic premises and then bringing them to life via strange and often entertaining blends of humor, horror and wicked social commentary in films like “Q—The Winged Serpent” and “The Stuff,” which satirized fast-food culture by imagining that the new dessert sensation sweeping the country was actually an alien organism that was feeding off of those feeding upon it. While watching the odd new Argentinian thriller “4X4,” I couldn’t help but be reminded of Cohen’s work because it too offers up a singularly loopy premise and then does a good job of milking it for humor and suspense for most of its running time. It does sort of fall apart in the final scenes but oddly enough, that also tended to be a feature of many of Cohen’s films as well." (more)
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FILMS I NEGLECTED TO REVIEW: THAT'S WHAT THEY WANT YOU TO THINK.
by Peter Sobczynski |
| "Please enjoy short reviews of "Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar," "Land," "The Mauratanian," "To All The Boys: Always and Forever," "The World to Come" and the new Criterion Collection edition of the 1974 conspiracy thriller classic "The Parallax View."" (more) |
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ROTTERDAM 2021--AN OVERVIEW
by Peter Sobczynski |
| "Here is a brief overview of this year's International Film Festival Rotterdam, the first half of which was presented virtually from February 1-7." (more) |
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'AND YOU DON'T TALK TO HER. YOU USE YOUR FACE. YOU USE YOUR BODY. YOU USE EVERYTHING. THAT'S WHAT I DO.'
- Mike Damone, Fast Times At Ridgemont High
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