REVIEW: Standing Up, Falling Down [2020]

Regret is real. Sometimes your dream isn’t much of a dream at all. Maybe reality sets in after you’re already well along the path taken in error. Perhaps the epiphany arrives before you’ve sacrificed the correct choice in order to choose wrong. Ask Scott Rollins (Ben Schwartz) and he’ll probably tell you it can even be both at once if you happen to have two dreams vying for your attention. For him it was a career in stand-up comedy and the woman (Eloise Mumford‘s Becky) he saw himself building a…

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REVIEW: The Homesman [2014]

“God will strike you down” I didn’t necessarily love The Homesman, but it’s hard not to respect it. This is a dark story in the desolate Mid-West with outlaw justice and remorseless murder surrounding the charitably selfless journey of Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank) and the three crazed women she’s taking across the Missouri into Iowa so they can be cared for under reasonable conditions. It can’t have been an easy adaptation of Glendon Swarthout‘s novel for director Tommy Lee Jones and his co-writers Kieran Fitzgerald and Wesley A. Oliver…

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TIFF12 REVIEW: Frances Ha [2013]

“Ahoy, sexy” A Noah Baumbach film through and through, I can’t help but praise lead actress and co-writer Greta Gerwig‘s influence in making Frances Ha the quirky, subtly hilarious portrait of a twentysomething refusing to accept she is overdue for adulthood that it is. When her titular Frances unabashedly apologizes for “not being a real person”, the hyperbolic exclamation isn’t far off the mark. Living to have fun while hoping life will ultimately fall into place, the realization it’s only passing her by leads to a quarter-life crisis of identity…

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REVIEW: Larry Crowne [2011]

ā€œBeaver Fever. Catch It!ā€ I really like the poster. The sky blue with the alternating thick/thin sans serif font and the jarringly bright yellow, drawing your eye to it and down towards the pair of movie stars at bottom right. Julia Roberts looks ecstatic and Tom Hanks suavely cool on his scooterā€”this could be a gem of a film with some sophisticated style. Alas, though, it is not. After starting with the charming joke of a middle-aged man living and breathing his retail sales job, picking up the trash in…

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