Finishing up July:
25TH ANNIVERSARY: BATMAN (1989): "...still among the brightest of the comic book genre films; an odd thing, given how dark it is."-AE
25TH ANNIVERSARY: STAR TREK V: THE FINAL FRONTIER (1989): "A bored Klingon and his buxom babe, Uhura’s moonlit striptease, Scotty’s sudden lust for Uhura while eating potato chips, agnostic theology at its most cornball, a Heaven planet with unforgivably cheap FX, and a fuzzy group hug finale solicit well-earned groans, even more so twenty-five years later. However, despite the PC interracial cast, occasional sexism, barbershop-styled backslapping, a lot of bad acting, and the fanatical following, it is easy to succumb to the charm of the original cast..." -AE
NYMPHOMANIAC, VOL. 1 & 2 (2013):"The depraved behavior that we see these characters engage in is ghastly and cruel, but it’s all so beautifully shot and presented that the pornographic elements become more like a reflection of reality than a means of cheaply shocking viewers."-RA
ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE (2013): "Colorful, arabesque, and throbbing with a melancholy drone, the purpose of the movie is not to tell a story so much as to enfold us inside of these vampires’ immortal languor."
A FANTASTIC FEAR OF EVERYTHING (2012): "Fortunately, there is a lot of extraneous stuff going on to distract us from the movie’s nerve-wracking protagonist—eyeball hallucinations, self-aware Psycho references, paper doll reenactments of famous murders, creepy anthropomorphic stop-animated children’s stories, guided meditation with a pirate psychologist—and thus
Everything manages to remain watchable by keeping itself busy."
BLUE MOVIE (1978): "Be warned that
Blue Movie is as trashy as it is artful: its perversion, madness, trauma, bodily fluids and softcore sex will be unpalatable for many."-TM
THE CONGRESS (2013): "Underneath the bitter satire and trippy visuals,
The Congress is ultimately about identity, and how it becomes another commodity to be bartered—at first, hesitantly by Robin [Wright], and ultimately as a way of life for the populace."-LRH/AK
THE END OF TIME (2012):"The final act is a lysergic digital freakout presumably representing 'the end of time,' beginning with the extinction of the sun, which turns into a bunch of glowing green mandalas and segues into a cosmic Malickian montage. The overall result—abstract and meandering, sometimes deep, sometimes pretentious, beautiful but frequently slow as molasses—is definitely not for all tastes."