The Hateful Eight
Dec25

The Hateful Eight

Crude Grit Starring: Kurt Russell, Samuel L. Jackson Review written by Robert D. Patrick Beginning with a suffocating, taut score that is so tight it leaves rope burns, Quentin Tarantino’s blood flecked roadshow of cigar masticating hate refuses to bury the lead. The dialogue, per usual, is a cat’s cradle of gasoline and saliva charged machismo. Every garish syllable spewed is a sizzling wick for future carnage. To say too...

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Digging For Fire
Aug28

Digging For Fire

  Improvised, corkscrewed dialogue and loose body language. The mumblecore moniker wraps itself around director Joe Swanberg’s existential opus about the suppressed desires of a modern adult couple. The contemporary malaise of thirty-somethings has been explored, ad nauseam, recently. Here, however, we are not tracing the lines of a disheveled manchild whose confidence bobs and weaves through a plume of weed smoke....

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The Silence
Mar22

The Silence

Cold Case: Germany Review written by Robert Patrick Starring: Ulrich Thomsen, Claudia Michelsen The Silence’s pastoral and yet sinister title implies that you’re about to see some concentrated brooding, unbridled heartache, and teeth gnashing detective work. Baron bo Odar’s melancholy film is about two murders, committed twenty-three years apart, in the same location. What sort of macabre shadowplay is at work? Why...

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John Dies at the End
Feb14

John Dies at the End

Wicked & Weird Starring: Chase Williamson, Rob Mayes Review written by Robert D. Patrick Hallucinatory, spiked with weirdness, kinetic and grimy. These are laymen ways to describe the kaleidoscopic and serpentine John Dies at the End, a movie directed with cutting wit and macabre abandon by Don Coscarelli. The aforementioned auteur is the madman behind such films as Phantasm and Bubba Ho-Tep, movies that include a foppish mummy...

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Take Shelter
Oct14

Take Shelter

When Nightmares Become Your Paul Revere Starring: Michael Shannon, Jessica Chastain Review written by Robert Patrick Jeff Nichols, the director of “Take Shelter”, is a locksmith at turning the key on rustic, red dirt worlds of volatile friendships and swinging-gate relationships. The filmmaker is only two films into his career – “Shotgun Stories”, his first fiery opus, was a powder keg of a movie –...

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All Good Things
Dec17

All Good Things

Look Out, Gosling Hates Bookshelves! Starring: Kirsten Dunst, Ryan Gosling Written by Robert Patrick I had not seen Kirsten Dunst for sometime. I had thought she was in the belly of a whale somewhere. Perhaps the actress was busy toiling away on a time machine to go back and undo “Marie Antoinette”. Then I hear about this movie, “All Good Things”. I hear that it has Ryan Gosling in it, that Kirsten Dunst may or...

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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Mar18

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Journalism: Another Step into Looking Boring Starring: Michael Nyqvist, Noomi Rapace By Robert Patrick “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” is a mystery about a young woman, missing since the late nineteen-sixties, whose photograph finds itself sardonically perched against the weathered hands of one her family members. Where did she disappear to? To what fate did she meet? These blurred questions, posed by her uncle Henrik Vanger, an...

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Shutter Island
Feb19

Shutter Island

The Grand Marshal of a Ghost Parade Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo By Robert Patrick “Shutter Island” is oozing with gloom and anxiety. Martin Scorsese knows better than anyone how to craft mood, slip it into every crack and crevice, slather it over every frame with artisan care. The shadows of doubt and madness have certainly fallen upon, if not entirely swallowed, an asylum hosted by an island off the coast of...

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The Missing Person
Jan26

The Missing Person

Nothing’s Easy, Baby Starring: Michael Shannon, Amy Ryan By Robert Patrick Most noir films feel slicked with perverse, uncouth undercurrents. Bubbling under the surface of its monochrome skin, the genre pulsates dread and sleaziness. In director Noah Buschel’s neo-noir, “The Missing Person,” the standard template of hazy cool has been tweaked a bit to show a reality that, despite our feverish wishes, isn’t as smooth and scripted...

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The White Ribbon
Jan22

The White Ribbon

The Quiet is Worse than the Storm Starring: Christian Friedel, Ulrich Tuker By Robert Patrick The Golden Globes nominated, and then, without an ounce of justification, awarded “The White Ribbon” as the best foreign language film of 2009. This gives me shivers of terror. I’d go as far as to say, with total confidence, that “The White Ribbon” is the most painful film I’ve seen in sometime. To me, the pacing is non-existent. I’ve had...

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