The Six-Film Engagement

This week I reviewed a sextet of films of which the standouts are the documentary Booker's Place and, by far the most high-profile of the lot and the film which gives this post its (somewhat strained) title, The Five-Year Engagement. It seems that I'm in the minority in digging this one, with most of the critical hatred seeming to center on the film's formulaic nature. The thing about genre, though, is that it is formulaic. It's a question of tweaking the formula and using the genre's dictates intelligently, tasks ably handled by Nicholas Stoller's fine rom-com.


The Five-Year Engagement (Slant)
Dolphin Boy (Village Voice)
Inventing Our Life: The Kibbutz Experiment (Village Voice)
Payback (Time Out New York)
Booker's Place (Time Out New York)
96 Minutes (Time Out New York)

The Long Delayed Return of the Linkthrough

After several weeks of not posting, there are plenty of reviews to be rounded up including my second ever stab at music criticism. As far as the films go,most occupy a middle ground between excellence and decrepitude, though nearly all are of some interest.

Film
Chimpanzee (Slant)
The Moth Diaries (Slant)
Trishna (Slant)
Here (Slant)
Downtown Express (Time Out New York)
Unraveled (Time Out New York)

Music
Vijay Iyer Trio: Accelerando (In Review Online)

We Have Four Reviews...

...of films ranging from fair to middling. (Actually, MIS: Human Secret Weapon, a documentary about Japanese-Americans who aided the US war effort during World War II via the Military Intelligence Service, is worth a look.) Otherwise, it's business as usual.

We Have a Pope (Slant)
MIS: Human Secret Weapon (Village Voice)
Surviving Progress (Time Out New York)
We the Party (Time Out New York)