Call it Bro Travail.

Check out her work with Assayas. She's fabulous. Only American actress to win a César Award.

Really enjoyed this. I dunno if it's just a cynical pop culture cliché at this point, but I really expected to read about how the band was tired of their big hit song and too cool for it, or whatever. Good on them.

I liked -some- of it. The actors, the style, the feeling of real terror at hazing…. But man oh man, it's way uneven and tries way too hard as it goes along. Hated the ending on particular.

Mixed bag. Loved some parts, did not love others.

Oh, nice. Was wondering whether this would ever open here (landed on my radar after one of its actors, Rabah Nait Oufella, stole whole chunks of Raw). Glad to hear it's every bit as good as it looks.

Punk doesn't have the range.

That's an interesting, productive way to read it. I hated it so much I couldn't really re-focus like that, but it's worth thinking about. Wouldn't be the only case where a work found a more interesting life outside of the author's intentions.

Surprised that 4 Little Girls couldn't crack the top 20.

I kinda love Tyler's "I Ain't Got Time." It sounds like he's doing Missy Elliot, which is fine by me.

That's Iñárritu.

Hal Holbrook is really outstanding in it. Some of the other actors are pretty good, too.

Yeah, that Iñárritu sequence is deeply, deeply uncomfortable to watch (and morally questionable), but at least it's honest, if that's the right word. Loach decides to set fire to the whole project, which is also fine. I thought the Ouedraogo short was kinda sweet?, which made it a really odd fit for the group.

I didn’t get a chance to have many intellectual conversations with Vanilla Ice.

Really exceptional review. Alexievich is one of the those writers in my queue I keep seeming to shuffle lower. I don't know if I have it in me. There are passages in Grossman that wrecked me for weeks. I need time and a stiff drink or ten before I tackle her work.

I went into Chappie with a lot of goodwill, thinking that critics were probably just ganging up on it for not being another District 9 or something. Oof. Believe the anti-hype.

Best thing I saw this week was 45 Years. Man oh man, did that movie sneak up on me. I watched the first hour or so thinking "Yeah, this is very well done and respectable etc." and being impressed but not necessary moved. The last shot wrecked me completely. Wrecked me.

Not laughing at the Versailles comparison: in fact, I think that's part of the point. There's kitsch high and low, and the specificity of the kitsch here - the fact that the expensive house Martin breaks into looks so much more desperate and tacky than even the run-down factories in the background - is, I think, part…

Martin is my favorite Romero…. though I'd probably delete the scene with the failed drug bust, which doesn't work and throws the film's rhythms off. I get why it's there in terms of some of the themes Romero is exploring, but it really is a clunker in the middle of an otherwise great film.

I don't think he's saying that the genre is inherently xenophobic, but that it "often had at least a whiff of xenophobia," which is true. So many classics of the genre involve some kind of threat from a strange foreign land (Draculas*, mummies, curse-wielding gypsies, voodoo priests, ) or from caricatures of rural…