Notebook Reviews: Rafi Pitts’s “The Hunter”
Fernando F. CrocePitts’s visual control ensures that the divide between institutionalized injustice and personal revenge remains volatile, thorny terrain
Fernando F. Croce
-
-
Notebook Reviews: Steven Spielberg's "War Horse"
Fernando F. CroceAll of Spielberg’s sumptuous pomp and sweep add up to little more than an inflated equine remake of Lassie Come Home.
-
Notebook Reviews: Guy Ritchie’s “Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows” and Brad Bird’s “Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol”
Fernando F. CroceA pair of decathlons for quasi-superhero protagonists that briefly come alive as spot-the-auteur games.
-
Notebook Reviews: Lynne Ramsay’s “We Need to Talk About Kevin”
Fernando F. CroceLynne Ramsay’s third feature is a mishmash of soiled diapers, leaden musical cues and underlined soul-sickness,
-
Notebook Reviews: Martin Scorsese’s "Hugo"
Fernando F. CroceThis restless phantasmagoria is fond, melancholy and not quite serene.
-
Notebook Reviews: Samuel Fuller's "House of Bamboo" (1955)
Fernando F. CroceSamuel Fuller in Japan, like tabloid ink sprayed on kakejiku scrolls.
-
Notebook Reviews: Rupert Wyatt’s “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” and Joe Cornish’s “Attack the Block”
Fernando F. CroceBlockbuster apes and low-budget aliens in a double-bill of subtext-rich science fiction.
-
Notebook Reviews: Evan Glodell’s "Bellflower"
Fernando F. CroceA striking debut suspended between low-key, Sundance relationship drama and hyper-saturated, ’70s-style grindhouser.
-
Notebook Reviews: Miranda July's "The Future"
Fernando F. CroceArguably the strangest study of artistic and parental anxiety since Eraserhead.
-
Notebook Reviews: Rainer Werner Fassbinder's "World on a Wire"
Fernando F. CroceThe sci-fi masterpiece, part “Alphaville”, part Fritz Lang, part “The Matrix”, yet wholly original.
-
Notebook Reviews: Denis Villeneuve’s “Polytechnique” and John Carpenter’s “The Ward”
Fernando F. CroceFramed in a close shot, college students go about their business around a Xerox machine when a spray of bullets suddenly rips into the image. Polytechnique, Denis Villeneuve's 2009 fictionalized account
-
Notebook Reviews: Michael Bay’s “Transformers: Dark of the Moon”
Fernando F. Croce"Visual, therefore visceral," snaps John Malkovich in Transformers: Dark of the Moon as some sort of wacky Michael Bay proxy, a conglomerate martinet who screams at his crew, checks out the leading lady