Girls Can Play

Movie and TV reviews and interviews

Friday, August 23, 2013

100 Words On: Singin’ in the Rain

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Where The Artist damned the silent film era with fake praise, professing nostalgia for the worst of its sentimental excesses,...
Friday, July 26, 2013

100 Words on…. The Power of Nightmares

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This is a rare chance to see a powerful film that never aired on American TV or had a standard theatrical run since its BBC de...
Friday, July 19, 2013

100 Words on... The Servant

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A glittery-eyed Dirk Bogarde morphs from abject subservience to contemptuous control while James Fox slowly deflates from the une...
Monday, March 18, 2013

SXSW 2013: Getting Back to Abnormal, This Ain't No Mouse Music!, No More Road Trips? Don Jon

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Friday, March 15, 2013

SXSW 2013: Computer Chess, Swim Little Fish, Loves Her Gun

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The fuzzy, shades-of-gray black-and-white of the decades-old Sony video camera that director Andrew Bujalski used to shoot Comp...
Tuesday, March 12, 2013

SXSW 2013: Before Midnight, Mud, The Act of Killing

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My friend John Morthland, who programmed panels for the South by Southwest film festival in its infancy, says he could only g...
Thursday, December 13, 2012

Consuming Spirits

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Consuming Spirits is what you might get if Ironweed mated with A Prairie Home Companion and had a movie baby. Set in a Rust Be...
Friday, November 23, 2012

The Central Park Five

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It’s been a good year for cautionary tales about how easy it is for our criminal justice system to be abused—and abusive. The Hou...
Friday, November 16, 2012

Red Dawn

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Like John Milius' 1984 original, from which it never strays far, Dan Bradley’s remake feeds the warrior fantasies of adolesce...

A Man Vanishes

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When director Shoehei Imamura started this black-and-white docudrama in the mid-1960s, he intended to investigate why tens thousa...
Thursday, November 8, 2012

Burn

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For a few disheartening minutes, grim statistics and drive-by shots of Detroit’s abandoned buildings make this look like another ...

Café de Flore

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“I like to cut the sound. It gives more punch to what’s coming,” Antoine (Kevin Parent) says of his DJ-ing style in Café de Fl...
Saturday, October 13, 2012

No

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No was part of the 2012 New York Film Festival The brilliant Chilean director Pablo Larraín gives us another take (after Tony ...
Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Smashed

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Mary Elizabeth Winstead is magnetic as Kate in Smashed , a delayed coming-of-age story that never quite gets inside its heroine...
Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Night Across the Street

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Night Across the Street was part of the 2012 New York Film Festival "It was very autobiographical," said producer Fra...
Monday, October 1, 2012

Memories Look at Me

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Memories Look at Me was part of the 2012 New York Film Festival In this quiet meditation on mortality, the he...
Friday, September 28, 2012

Here and There

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Here and There will play on September 29, October 2 and October 10 as part of the 2012 New York Film Festival. Here and There...

Talking to Steadicam Pioneer Larry McConkey

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Stockton, New Jersey resident Larry McConkey is a cinematographer and award-winning Steadicam operator whose credits include ...
Thursday, September 27, 2012

Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion

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As cheeky as its stripped-down, Pink Panther-esque Ennio Morricone score, this 1970 Italian satire starts at the apartment of...
Wednesday, September 26, 2012

The Waiting Room

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In this scrupulously realistic and ultimately optimistic documentary, Peter Nicks creates what appears to be a chronicle of a...
Wednesday, September 19, 2012

My Uncle Rafael

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LA is home to more Armenians than almost anyplace else in the diaspora, so it was probably inevitable that we’d eventually get...
Thursday, September 13, 2012

Snowman's Land

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Skilled at establishing a deadpan look and tone but not always successful at maintaining narrative tension, Snowman’s Land is a pr...
Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Beauty is Embarrassing

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Director Neil Berkeley’s first feature is as puckish as its subject, so steeped in artist Wayne White’s creative juices that it m...
1 comment:
Monday, September 3, 2012

Girl Model

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Most of us think we know a thing or two about the modeling business, regardless of whether our first thoughts are of bulimia or B...
Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Side by Side

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Where did longtime production manager and novice director Christopher Kenneally get the cojones to turn so many masters of the ...
Monday, August 27, 2012

Talking to Mike Birbiglia: Why Comedy is the New Punk Rock

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Sleepwalk with Me, a first movie by comedian and now writer-director Mike Birbiglia, seems at first to be a string of funny an...
Monday, August 13, 2012

The Odd Life of Timothy Green

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Disney draws a big fat bullseye on the fast-growing infertile-couple demographic with this airless misfire.
Thursday, August 9, 2012

Talking to Spike Lee: We Had the Crystal Ball in Do the Right Thing

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Red Hook Summer , Spike Lee’s latest movie, is the most recent entry in what this often great and always interesting director...
1 comment:
Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Red Hook Summer

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The flaws I attributed to little experience and less money in Spike Lee’s often brilliant feature debut, She’s Gotta Have It , ...
Tuesday, July 31, 2012

My All-Time Top 10 Movies

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It’s probably just coincidence, but the most creative periods for the movies seem to occur about every 30 years, usually triggered by some n...
Friday, July 20, 2012

Monty Python and the Holy Grail

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We’re all wise to the tricks the media is trying to play on us by now, but that kind of self-awareness was still pretty new when ...
Friday, July 13, 2012

To Rome with Love

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In To Rome with Love , Phyllis (a resplendent Judy Davis, looser than I can remember ever having seen her before), the sardonicall...
Friday, July 6, 2012

Collaborator

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Collaborator promises at first to be pleasantly loaded with subtext. Slow tracking shots make even luxurious environments look ...
Thursday, July 5, 2012

Do-Deca-Pentathlon

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In this comedy of bad manners, writer/director brothers Mark and Jay Duplass position their zoom-happy handheld camera, as usual,...
Friday, June 29, 2012

Kumare

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At end of Kumaré , an internal-journey-lite documentary that plays with the question of what constitutes true enlightenment the ...
Friday, June 15, 2012

Prometheus

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An Alien prequel with almost none of the original’s relentless suspense or scrappy irreverence, Prometheus plays a lot like one ...
Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Requiem for Detroit?

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Requiem for Detroit? will screen Thursday, June 14 and Sunday, June 17 at Anthology Film Archives's "Sometimes Cities:...

Salaam Dunk

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Salaam Dunk is screening June 16-18 as part of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival Shot in Northern Iraq in 2010, Salaam Du...
Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Safety Not Guaranteed

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“So what’s your story about?” a government agent asks a reporter as this strenuously wistful rom-com winds to a close. “Oh, the ...
1 comment:
Friday, June 1, 2012

The Dictator

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At his best, Sacha Baron Cohen knocks us off balance with blitzkriegs containing nearly every possible kind of joke, from gross...
Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Metal and Melancholy

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Thursday, May 31 at New York City's Spectacle Theater Flowing like a wide river of pleasure and pain, Metal and Melancholy...
Friday, May 18, 2012

Dark Shadows

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An awkwardly stitched-together collection of mismatched parts, Dark Shadows is a Frankenstein’s monster of a movie, a vampire ...
Friday, May 11, 2012

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

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In the blog that provides a cozy canopy of voiceover truisms to The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel , Evelyn Greenslade (Judi Dench)...
Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Patience (After Sebold)

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If it’s hard to adapt an artfully written traditional novel, imagine the challenge facing director Grant Gee ( Joy Division ) wh...

Where Do We Go Now?

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Where Do We Go Now? director Nadine Labaki likes to create a sense of family when she works, collaborating with people she lov...
Friday, May 4, 2012

Bernie

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In a nation that gets more homogenized every day, Texas still feels, as its ad slogan says, “like a whole other country.” That’...
Thursday, April 26, 2012

Headhunters

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A cocky Norwegian headhunter with a Napoleon complex (“It doesn’t take a PhD to see I’m overcompensating for my height,” he info...

Elles

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Elles played in this year's Tribeca Film Festival. A loose collection of half-baked ideas that even the great Juliette Bin...

Headshot

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Headshot played in this year's Tribeca Film Festival. This “Buddhist film noir,” as writer-director Pen-El Ranaruang calls ...

Talking Texas with Richard Linklater

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In Bernie, Richard Linklater tells the true story (based on a Texas Monthly article by Skip Hollandsworth) of a man in a small...
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About Me

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Elise Nakhnikian
Most of these pieces first appeared either in Brooklyn Magazine or its now defunct sister publication, The L magazine, or in Slant Magazine or its blog, The House Next Door. Here's what I've written for Slant and THND.
View my complete profile
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