Film Review: Le Week-End

Jesse and Celine in retirement: Fine acting can’t save voyeuristic, derivative film

Together, yet apart: Jim Broadbent' as Nick and Lindsay Duncan as Meg in a moody scene from Le Week-End.
Together, yet apart: Jim Broadbent as Nick and Lindsay Duncan as Meg in a moody scene from Le Week-End.

Your enjoyment of Le Week-End, the new collaboration from director Roger Michell (Hyde Park on Hudson, Notting Hill) and writer Hanif Kureishi (Venus, My Beautiful Launderette) will depend on your predilection for eavesdropping on intimate conversations between longtime couples. If being privy to such personal discussions intrigues and delights you, then you may be the audience for this picture. If the dissection of the intricacies of a 30-year-marriage doesn’t sound appealing to you, however, then you may want to pass on this one. Continue reading “Film Review: Le Week-End”

Film Feature: Chad’s Top 10 Films of 2013

Spinning Platters film critics Carrie Kahn and Chad Liffmann present their Top 10 Films of 2013.  Here’s Chad’s list, presented in the order of which he feels they deserve to be ranked (1 being the best, 10 being pretty damn good too!)

1.) Inside Llewyn Davis
"If it was never new and it never gets old, then it's a folk song"
“If it was never new and it never gets old, then it’s a folk song”

The Coen brothers newest film is a hilarious, thought-provoking, darkly intelligent, musical journey into the 1961 New York folk music scene.  Featuring masterful performances under the direction of master filmmakers, Inside Llewyn Davis is a documentary of sorts — accurately capturing a time period and a historical mentality…yet its message is timeless.

Continue reading “Film Feature: Chad’s Top 10 Films of 2013”

Film Review: Before Midnight

Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in Before Midnight
Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in Before Midnight

I was excited to see Before Midnight, the third film in the series directed by Richard Linklater that, in a way, I felt like I grew up with. The characters of Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) have always been so strong in my closet-romantic pseudo-intellectual imagination. I’m not going to pretend for a minute that I’m not a sucker for a good romantic movie, especially ones like the Before series where the characters feel so real and the dialogue is more like a true conversation than a planned script. I couldn’t wait to see what insights and ideas the newest film would bring me. Continue reading “Film Review: Before Midnight”