Ida (2014; Pawel Pawlikowski) GRADE: B- By Daniel Barnes “Understated and Carefully Controlled” Nominated for Best Cinematography and winner of Best Foreign Film at this year’s Academy Awards, the bone-dry, black-and-white Ida is the fifth film from Polish writer-director Pawel Pawlikowski, but it’s just his second in the […]
Timbuktu (2014; Abderrahmane Sissako) GRADE: B+ By Daniel Barnes This Best Foreign Film Oscar nominee from Mauritanian director Sissako (Bamako) looks at life in an African city forcibly placed under the rule of a new but brutal jihadist regime. Before your eyes glaze over and you start dreaming […]
The Duke of Burgundy (2015; Peter Strickland) GRADE: A- By Daniel Barnes “Luxurious and Layered” This luxurious and layered psycho-sexual drama is director Peter Strickland’s follow-up to his hypnotically stylish 2012 mind-fuck Berberian Sound Studio, which followed the breakdown of a mousy sound engineer working on a gory […]
Listen Up Philip (2014; Alex Ross Perry) GRADE: A- By Daniel Barnes With the neophyte novelist Philip Lewis Friedman, a self-loathing narcissist driven to new levels of boorish behavior by his extremely minor notability, writer-director Alex Ross Perry created a neurotic asshole for the ages. He makes Ben […]
The Zero Theorem (2014; Terry Gilliam) GRADE: C+ By Daniel Barnes In the opening shots of Terry Gilliam’s cheeky sci-fi dystopia The Zero Theorem, a bald, naked, future man studies the churning menace of a black hole on a large computer screen in an abandoned church. All the […]
Little Richard (2000; Robert Townsend) GRADE: D By Daniel Barnes *NOTE: This review was originally published on The Barnesyard in 2006. “Gentile, Quasi-Inspiring Treatment” Hollywood biopics are less filmed biographies than they are hagiographies. There is an assumption that every story should be “inspiring”, even if the subject […]
