Will Ross
The Last of the Unjust adds to an impressive body of work
May 26, 2014Few filmmakers’ careers are defined by one film as Claude Lanzmann’s has been. His 1985 sophomore documentary Shoah, a nine-hour film on the extermination of the Jews in the 1930s and 40s, is perhaps the most acclaimed documentary ever made. His latest film, The Last of the Unjust, takes a self-contravening step out of its shadow. Shoah was a monumental film, and justifiably so: comprised entirely of interviews with the bystanders, perpetrators, and above all victims of the Holocaust, the film confronts the way that the obscenities of the past reverberate forward in time. To watch Shoah is to go…
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Scarlett Johansson gets under your skin
May 5, 2014Happily, neither the cool reception of Jonathan Glazer’s masterpiece Birth, nor its lack of well-deserved critical rehabilitation in the intervening decade, have dulled the director’s approach to the intertwining mysteries of love and power. Under the Skin is another…
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The top 10 films of 2013
January 6, 201410. Gravity dir. Alfonso Cuaron A big-budget passion project of this level is no small event, and in a way it’s disarming that Gravity, Alfonso Cuarón’s four-years-in-the-making sci-fi opus, is so thematically simple. But on a level of craftsmanship, it’s insanely…
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Your movie nitpicking and pedantry sicken me
October 15, 2013On Sunday, Oct. 6, Neil Degrasse Tyson was fresh off of seeing Gravity and, bent on fulfilling his role as Premiere Pop Scientist, he slathered Twitter with scientific correctives. He later clarified that he viewed the right to scientific criticism…
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Miley’s not the problem: you are
September 9, 2013It was impossible to avoid. She’s been splattered across the front pages of news sites and dominated days of coverage and discourse — a paper thin cover over news holes that could be filled by matters of global importance. But…
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The World’s End ties up trilogy
September 2, 2013Arriving as the third installment in the critical and cult “Cornetto trilogy” started by Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, The World’s End had a lot to live up to: its forebears served roles as genre parodies and social…
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Monster Matriculation
July 8, 2013For the sake of fairness, let’s spot Pixar the unasked-for existence of Monsters University in the wake of two projects that both suffered from the studio’s inevitable bastardization at the hands of Disney. For though the original film did not…
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Cats will forever fuck up your game
June 17, 2013By Will Ross Cats are probably the worst thing that can happen to your sex life. When you first step into a strange apartment on your second, third, or eighth date, these little tyrants are often all that stands between…
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The fragmented life in To the Wonder
May 13, 2013Terrence Malick’s most recent effort is more poetry than narration By Will Ross Now that The Tree of Life is well behind us, Terrence Malick’s rep as the most radical director in the mainstream seems to have held firm. That’s…
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A Perfect Getaway is form turned inside out
May 13, 2013If you haven’t seen it before, consider checking out this psychological B-movie By Will Ross A Perfect Getaway does not occasion the sort of cult one might expect from a cursory overview: it is a psychological thriller B-movie about three…
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