Posted in: by Robert Horton, Contributors, Film Reviews

Review: Beast

Review by Robert Horton for Seattle Weekly

At first it comes on like a grim version of Sixteen Candles: a young, flame-haired woman flees her house after being upstaged at her own birthday party (where her older sister makes a happy announcement, with perfect malicious timing), then gets tipsy at a club and ends up with a dodgy boy who turns out to be a creep. Life is almost comically frustrating for Moll (Jessie Buckley), but Beast is no John Hughes scenario. Moll’s not a teenager anymore, and her stunted existence—she lives with her parents and helps tend a father with dementia—is shadowed by a troubling incident from her past.

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Posted in: by Robert Horton, Contributors, Film Reviews

Film Review: ‘Song One’

Anne Hathaway

People who don’t like musicals always fall back on the Realism Argument, contending that in real life we don’t start singing during conversations or solo walks in the Alps or whenever. This argument can be answered in a variety of ways: Don’t most of us have a soundtrack on shuffle in our heads? More important, who says musicals are supposed to be realistic?

The indie musical, embodied by the 2006 sleeper Once, has tried to sneak around the argument. In these movies people sing because they’re musicians; they sidle up to music, they shrug their way through a tune.

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