-
A Revlock Review: THE REVENANT
Visceral Approach to Filmmaking: The Revenant By Tinsel & Tine Contributor Mikhail Revlock The plot of THE REVENANT does not benefit from summarization. It’s 1823. A band of trappers and hunters are wandering about the Louisiana Purchase when they get ambushed by a tribe of Arikara Indians. Half of them survive. Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) is among the survivors. He’s a quiet man, visibly haunted. He’s one of the more experienced members of the party. Hawk (Forrest Goodluck), his half-breed son, is never far from his side. John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) sees them conferring in Pawnee and assumes they were involved in the attack. Glass gets mauled by a bear.…
-
A Revlock Review: THE HATEFUL EIGHT
Tarantino’s greatest strength remains his dialogue. Although the historical setting means no pithy dissections of Madonna or McDonald’s, it’s impressive how he can muster so much tension from ruminative, ornate conversations. His dialogue possesses a pleasing deliberateness that harkens back to the golden age of cinema and reveals by contrast the absence of wit in most modern films...
-
A Revlock Review: SECRET IN THEIR EYES
Gripping Yet Absurd By Tinsel &Tine Contributor Mikhail Revlock Secret in Their Eyes is easily the most preposterous film I have reviewed for Tinsel & Tine, outranking RunAll Night and even Beyondthe Reach. It is a film in which detectives look for a suspect in Dodger Stadium and find him in the first section they search. It is a film in which a self-published comic book is held up as incriminating evidence. It is a film in which Julia Roberts crawls into a dumpster, curls up beside her slain daughter, and weeps profusely as Chiwetel Ejiofor slowly backs away. A remake of the Oscar-Winning (and less awkwardly titled) El…
-
A Revlock Review: ROOM
Room is Harrowing yet Humane By Tinsel & Tine Contributor, Mikhail Revlock One cannot fault a sensitive, horror-averse moviegoer for balking at the premise of ROOM. On paper, the film reads as a realist revitalization of torture-porn tropes: Joy (Brie Larson) is kidnapped at nineteen by a bearded creep whom she refers to as Old Nick (Sean Bridgers), he imprisons her in a fortified garden shed and rapes her with nightly regularity, she gives birth to a child, and they live together in this tiny room for five years. With Eli Roth (Hostel) or James Wan (Saw) at the helm, Room could have represented an exercise in limit-pushing. However,…
-
A Revlock Review: SICARIO
Director Denis Villenueve’s American Crime Thriller By Tinsel & Tine Blog Contributor, Mikhail Revlock In the opening minutes of SICARIO, a team of FBI agents plow their armored truck through the front wall of a suburban home, find a legion of plastic-covered corpses behind the drywall, and trigger a massive explosion. Though none of the subsequent set pieces pack as big a punch as the introduction, the ensuing film is a masterwork in sustained tension. This will come as no surprise to followers of Canadian director Denis Villenueve, who rose to international distinction on the strength of Incendies—scoring a nomination for Best Foreign Film at the 2010 Academy Awards—and proceeded…
