Tag: John Crowley

Film Review: “We Live in Time”

We Live in Time rides out a thin, scattered story on the backs of its two leads

Somewhere between the time-jumping emotional cuteness of About Time and the grounded indieness of Like Crazy lives the new romantic drama We Live in Time from director John Crowley (Brooklyn). Many of the films within this genre tend to live or die according to the chemistry between their two leads. Whereas everything around the two leads – the jokes, the sub-plots, the meet-cute setups, the best friends – are truly secondary, unable to sway whether a film is considered effective. The chemistry between Florence Pugh (Little Women) and Andrew Garfield (The Social Network) in We Live in Time is the movie’s biggest strength, and raises the film’s level of emotional effectiveness. However, the secondary factors fail by comparison, leaving the film fizzling in its search for more laughs and more profound meaning within its vignette structure. Continue reading “Film Review: “We Live in Time””

Film Review: The Goldfinch

Acting, cinematography are highlights of imperfect adaptation of Tartt’s famed novel 

Cinematographer Roger Deakins captures the desert at dusk as Las Vegas transplants Theo (Oakes Fegley, l.) and Boris (Finn Wolfhard) become friends.

As a film critic, I try to ignore early buzz on films I’m going to review so I can form my own unbiased opinion when I see the picture. But this month, it was hard to ignore the vitriol that poured on to social media after The Goldfinch premiered at the Toronto Film Festival; hate for the movie was prolific and fierce. So, naturally, going into Monday’s reviewer screening, I was apprehensive: could the picture really be as bad as all that!? I’m here to tell you that, thankfully, it is not. Is it the year’s best film? Far from it, but it’s not nearly as awful as Twitter would have you believe. If you’re a cinema fan — and/or a fan of Donna Tartt’s 2013 Pulitzer Prize winning novel on which the film is based — you will find enough here to keep you interested.

Continue reading “Film Review: The Goldfinch“

Film Feature: Carrie’s Top 10 Films of 2015

Spinning Platters film critics present their top 10 films of 2015

Spinning Platters film critics Carrie Kahn and Chad Liffmann each share their ten favorite films of 2015. Here is Carrie’s list, presented in alphabetical order. (And you can find Chad’s here.)

1.) Brooklyn

Eilis (Saoirse Ronan) shares a tender moment with boyfriend Tony (Emory Cohen).

The immigrant experience in America is exquisitely captured in director John Crowley’s finely crafted film about love, loss, and longing in 1950s Brooklyn. Based on the novel by Colm Tóibín, Nick Hornby’s screenplay presents us with the intrepid young Irish woman Eilis, who leaves her family in the Irish countryside for adventure and opportunity in New York. Saoirse Ronan suberbly conveys Eilis’s gradual shift from shy newcomer to confident cosmopolitan. Called back home for a family emergency, Eilis must choose between familiar comforts and new possibilities, and Ronan depicts Eilis’s struggle with heartrending openness and aching honesty. Emory Cohen and Domhnall Gleeson, as competing suitors on opposite sides of the Atlantic, also deliver strong, sharply drawn performances.

Continue reading “Film Feature: Carrie’s Top 10 Films of 2015”