Movie Review: In Secret (2014)

by Tony Dayoub

Think The Postman Always Rings Twice in period costume and you'll instantly get what In Secret is all about. It is based on Émile Zola's novel, Thérèse Raquin, a kind of proto-noir. Elizabeth Olsen stars as Thérèse, an illegitimate cousin to the sickly Camille Raquin (Harry Potter's Tom Felton), who earns her keep as his sort of nurse. Camille's overprotective mother, Madame Raquin (played by the 1981 Postman's femme fatale, Jessica Lange) thinks she is doing all a favor by proposing a marriage between the two cousins. But Camille comes up short in the sexual heat department. Enter Laurent (Oscar Isaac), Camille's horny, hunky, childhood pal. It's not hard to figure where this is going from there.

The Best Movie of 2013: Inside Llewyn Davis

by Tony Dayoub

As I write this in a coffee shop, the wind chill outside makes it feel a number of degrees below 0°. That's chilly enough to remind me that I still haven't shared my thoughts on my favorite film this year, the Coen Brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis. A musical that's not a musical, Inside Llewyn Davis is set in the kind-of-blue/kind-of-snowy, early 60s folk scene of Greenwich Village. And its eponymous protagonist is not a character you easily... pardon the pun... warm up to. Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) is a talented singer-songwriter, and we know it not just because of his excellent performance of the traditional "Hang Me, Oh Hang Me" that opens the film.

Movie Review: Drive (2011)

by Tony Dayoub

Awright, what movie did everyone else see? Because the overhyped Drive is a shallow film as hollow as its cardboard characters. Yes, I said "characters," with an "s." Not simply content to make his nameless lead character — the Driver (Ryan Gosling), we'll call him (as the press materials do) — a cipher, director Nicolas Winding Refn (Bronson) populates his film with empty, soulless vessels doubling for actual people. There's the nice-girl-who-got-involved-with-the-wrong-guy, the older-version-of-our-lead-who-sports-a-symbolically-loaded-disability, the down-on-his-luck-ex-con-who-wants-to-get-out-after-one-last-job, etc. (If I'm not careful, this whole review may degenerate into a series of etceteras.) In this world, style overrides substance, surface trumps depth, and personalities are so thin that the existence of the story's players seems to cease whenever they disappear offscreen.