I watched just four movies last week:
 |
 |
 |
 |
- Novocaine some modest charms, and does about everything clever you can do with its premise, but it’s also kind of forgettable.
- Amy Taubin of Film Comment described Carol as “a film composed of gestures and glances….[that] could not exist without the extraordinary performances of Blanchett and Mara.”
- There’s probably good reason for film historians to watch Shockproof, for its collision of Douglas Sirk and Samuel Fuller, but as a moviegoing experience, it’s mostly just very dated, stilted, and contrived.
- Presence is an interesting experiment—it’s no real spoiler to reveal that it’s a haunted house story from the viewpoint of the ghost—but I’m not entirely sure it successfully rises far enough above the level of experiment, if only because the way the movie is filmed imposes a certain cold distance from the characters and their story.