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Aidan Quinn

25 Jun

Fifty Shades Darker; 20th Century Women; Patriots Day and more – review

Max SchindlerUncategorized
The second Fifty Shades is flawed but easy on the eye, while Annette Bening gives the performance of her life as a single mother in 70s LAI don’t believe in the term “guilty pleasure”: if a film, however ropey, gives me pleasure, I’m not ashamed to concede that something about it is working. Still, the delight I take in Fifty Shades Darker (Universal, 18) pushes this attitude to its limit. The first film based on EL James’s potpourri-porn novels was surprisingly sly, pruning and embellishing the author’s lilac prose with something like irony. This follow-up, directed in gaudily gilded fashion…
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18 Jun

Moonlight; The Lego Batman Movie; Harmonium; The Exterminating Angel and more – review

Max SchindlerUncategorized
A repeat viewing enhances Barry Jenkins’s masterly Oscar-winning drama about a gay man growing up in Miami, while on a lighter note, Chris McKay’s Dark Knight parody almost matches up to its predecessorSeveral months on from that chaotic moment at the Oscar podium, the topsy-turvy best picture triumph of Moonlight (Altitude, 15) seems no less astonishing in retrospect. In a sense, Barry Jenkins’s shimmering, trisected portrait of a young African American man’s developing sexuality had to win in unprecedented circumstances, because nothing like it had ever scaled that summit of mainstream acclaim. Still, we should resist the urge to turn…
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11 Jun

Fences; Loving; The Founder; The Student and more – review

Max SchindlerUncategorized
It’s the films about the African American experience that provide this week’s dramatic highlightsTwo very different kinds of awards-approved acting, both penetrating in their own way, are on display in Fences (Paramount, 12) and Loving (Universal, 12), a pair of stern, stately but intimate portraits of the black experience in mid-20th-century America. In the former, Viola Davis and Denzel Washington hurl the furiously worded speeches of playwright August Wilson at each other with blazing, bruising intensity – the thespian equivalent of bare-knuckle fighting. The latter, though, gives Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton about as many words in total as Davis…
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04 Jun

T2 Trainspotting; Split; Prevenge and more – review

Max SchindlerUncategorized
The sequel to Trainspotting is tinged with despair, but James McAvoy’s damaged kidnapper brings out the best in M Night Shyamalan“Has it really been more than 20 years since Trainspotting?” was my first thought before watching T2 Trainspotting (Sony, 18), in accordance with the cruel law of ageing dictating that the older you get, the shorter your life seems to have been. By the time the closing credits roll, I felt differently. It may hardly show on Ewan McGregor’s face, but a palpable passage of time separates Danny Boyle’s 1996 scuzzy thunderclap of a youth movie from this slicker but slacker sequel, which…
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28 May

Toni Erdmann; The Salesman; Jackie; Who’s Gonna Love Me Now? and more

Max SchindlerUncategorized
Maren Ade’s parent-child comedy is a triumph, while Asghar Farhadi’s domestic suspense film doesn’t match his bestI am writing this week’s column in the balmy rosé-and-Nurofen glow of the Cannes film festival, where Pedro Almodóvar’s jury is about to dish out its prizes. If things go as they usually do, critics will feel alternately vindicated and perplexed by the winners, and a masterpiece or two will go entirely ignored and be just fine anyway – just ask Toni Erdmann (Soda, 15). This time last year, Maren Ade’s ingenious, elastic twist on the parent-child comedy earned the most ecstatic reviews of…
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21 May

Lion; Hacksaw Ridge; Sing and more – review

Max SchindlerUncategorized
Sunny Pawar is extraordinary as a child lost abroad in the heartbreaking Lion, while Mel Gibson typically makes a bloody mess of Hacksaw RidgeThere are films against which one’s head puts up a fight until, finally, the heart simply wants what it wants. Lion (eOne, PG) is one. This sweeping, sun-baked account of a life fatefully divided in childhood between two countries and families risks applying a glib National Geographic gloss to a unique existential crisis, until its sheer blunt force of feeling takes hold and the tear ducts are unlocked. Its opening stages, vividly conveying young Saroo Brierley’s accidental…
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14 May

La La Land; Manchester By the Sea; Graduation and more – review

Max SchindlerUncategorized
Damien Chazelle’s sun-drenched musical is even lovelier on second viewing, while Casey Affleck’s janitor evokes BrandoStunningly losing the best picture Oscar may turn out to be the best thing that could have happened to La La Land (Lionsgate, 12), Damien Chazelle’s sun-bright, sour-sweet satsuma of a musical. Formally released from the prestige pressure bestowed by such a title, the film that inspired such a hysterical pre-Oscar backlash as to be labelled “fascist propaganda” in certain quarters of the internet can be cherished once more as the bijou beauty it is – a film out not to change the world, but to wistfully warm…
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DVD Guide reviews current dvd releases of movies and TV shows. The reviews of these dvd releases are my thoughts and understandings of the movie, dvd releases or TV show and not be taken as fact.

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