“Ash Is Purest White” Explores the Vulnerability of Love

Renowned director Jia Zhangke’s newest outing, “Ash Is Purest White,” plays with and extends his oldest instinct: winding around the lives of a few individuals who have experienced China’s last century of transformation and upheaval. This time around, the movie anchors around a gangster couple. The mob boss Bin (Liao Fan) is a rising star of the Datong underworld, a mining city whose seedy elements thrive despite the precipitous drop in the price of coal. Bin’s girlfriend Qiao (Zhao Tao) kee

“Stop Making Sense” Suspends Clarity for Sensory Delight

“Stop Making Sense” begins and ends with the image of David Byrne’s lithe, seemingly boneless body writhing according to a mysterious tempo, as it sinuously weaves in and out of a multi-instrumental rhythm by the accomplished members of Talking Heads — whom the concert film follows for four nights at the Pantages Theatre in 1983. Recently screened at Amherst Cinema, the film opens with the song “Psycho Killer” in which Byrne’s cracking voice hectors and hassles the smooth strings of his weathe

"Glass" Wraps Up Shyamalan Trilogy With Few Delights

Popular consensus has not been kind to director M. Night Shyamalan — just look to the truly baffling “The Last Airbender” to confirm its hostility. One of the most distinctive voices in American popular film, Shyamalan has long withered under the public image of a thwarted prodigy, perhaps unfairly. His failures are bold and blatant, if only because his ambitions share the same qualities. Never one to completely upend the genres that he navigates with surprising dexterity, Shyamalan, neverthel

Golden Globe Nominee “Shoplifters” Comes to Amherst Cinema

Director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “Shoplifters,” his newest cinematic plunge into the urban discomforts of contemporary Japan, arrives in Amherst Cinema after its yearlong triumph in the international film festival circuit. On the surface, Kore-eda’s little tale about a clan of petty thieves meets every assumption regarding the artistic conservatism of these award functions. For all of the transgressive messages of severing hurtful pasts and choosing your own family, the shoplifters organize them

“Wings of Desire” Successfully Breaks Fantasy Genre Tropes

Amherst Cinema will screen “Wings of Desire” on Dec. 2 and 4, the 1987 classic film of German cinema and a quintessential artifact from the time of two Germanys. The movie’s straightforward humanism is textured with an enchanted, meditative style that has earned it an immense following over the decades, and which has repeatedly confirmed its status in the international arthouse scene. Despite its age, “Wings of Desire,” a story about two angels roaming around Berlin, firmly plants itself in the

Amherst Cinema Screens Works of French Filmmaker Agnes Varda

For the past two months, Amherst Cinema has been holding screenings of the works of Agnes Varda, a French filmmaker whose movies were released in the mid-20th century. Varda made inimitable contributions to the amorphous category of films we nowadays label “arthouse cinema,” and with the final screening of “Beaches of Agnes” on Oct. 30, it may be useful to track Varda’s life and works to answer how and why she more than merits her place in our local theater. Varda did not begin her artistic lif

Demon in Red: Panos Cosmatos’ Film “Mandy” Fails to Please

Red Miller (Nicholas Cage) lives in the mountains with his artist-wife Mandy Bloom (Andrea Riseborough), hidden from the rest of society in deep and enduring love. However, hints of the dangerous nature of their relationship surface: Red is a recovering alcoholic, and Mandy’s fantastical art sketches out the abstract contours of some undisclosed trauma. On a regular day in the Shadow Mountains, they are visited by a dangerous cult that calls itself Children of the New Dawn — a gang of demoni

“BlacKkKlansman” Promises Radicalism, But Fails to Deliver

For a brief moment in the final stretch, “BlacKkKlansman” sheds the infiltration shenanigans and the tired cop camaraderie. The audience sit down with the Colorado College Black Student Union to hear an older individual’s whispered account of horrifying crimes, who speaks of what he saw on a particularly hot day of 1916. They castrated Jesse Washington. Then they burned him alive. The students sob even without proof, but the old sufferer shows them anyway: how they cut him, how they killed him.

Anderson’s “Phantom Thread” Fails to Live up to Lofty Ambitions

“Phantom Thread” opens with Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis), a celebrated fashion designer of the 1950s, in his incorrigible routine: an uneventful breakfast, stilted conversation with his sister Cyril (Lesley Manville), dealings with his occasionally-royal patrons and a dinner and sleep as tranquil as the breakfast that began the day. The rest of the movie details the change and destruction that his newfound model and muse, Alma (Vicky Krieps), ushers into his disciplined life. This chan

“Twin Peaks: The Return” Revives Lingering Questions of its Past

“Twin Peaks: The Return” tells the story of FBI agent Dale Cooper, who in the original series was assigned to solve the murder case of Laura Palmer, the high school homecoming queen in the town of Twin Peaks, Wash. Over the course of the original two-season run on ABC, Agent Cooper unraveled the mystery of the killer only to find himself entangled in a greater, older, cosmic mystery involving demons, hell and heaven; a mystery whose indelible images constantly refused to cleanly classify themsel

“The Florida Project” Creates Cinematic Art in Color and Sound

“The Florida Project,” one of the year’s critical darlings, immediately places a question in viewers’ minds that remains unanswered by the rest of the film. What exactly is the “Florida Project”? It is clearly a play on words that, like all puns, begins from an assumed definition. This premise is a Florida housing “project” — in fact a motel, ironically named the Magic Castle — looked after by the kindly caretaker Bobby (Willem Defoe), occupied by unemployed Halley (Bria Vinaite) and constantl

“The Lost City of Z” Offers an Original Synthesis of Movie Tropes

The kind of films shown in smaller local movie theaters such as Amherst Cinema possess a unique and identifiable mood to them. True, there is remarkable diversity in both content and origin not found in the box offices, but such an abundance of life is communicated in an equally rarified manner. The films almost always nibble at life, reluctant to chow down upon any grand sweeping statements about society or the universe. In the worst cases, it is an absence of ambition garbed as aesthetic, a fe

Jordan Peele’s Directorial Debut, “Get Out” Lives up to Hype

Spoiler-free article! The premise of this movie is simple enough — perhaps that is the first of its strengths. The audience finds the protagonist Chris packing his things, playing cute with his girlfriend Rose and preparing himself to meet his girlfriend’s parents. Along the journey home, the movie leaks countless hints that Rose’s parents possess little to no sense of racial sensitivity. But they mean well, Rose insists. Chris, despite his misgivings, goes along with her to the Armitages’ home

Park Chan-Wook’s The Handmaiden Reignites South Korean Film

Acclaimed director Park Chan-Wook released “The Handmaiden” to great anticipation but somewhat lackluster enthusiasm. The film netted South Korea an invitation to compete in the prestigious Cannes film festival after a four-year drought, and in both premise and presentation it fulfills the promise implied by such an honor. The film finds itself amid the destitution and deprivation of Korea under Japanese occupation in the 20th century, and it follows the ambitious and admirably conceived project

The Common’s 12th Issue Shines With Emotive Relevance and Unity

Splashed with a soft, cotton red and superimposed by a lonesome ice skate, the front flap of the 12th issue of “The Common” speaks of a coolly detached professionalism that attends the small, physical body of this publication in sight and feel. It is specifically that misleading nonchalance that may incline the potential reader to think that the skate emblemizes some central mystery that the pages will slowly investigate and resolve. At least, it points to an unrelated but nonetheless unifying a

“Lights Out” Director David Sanberg Follows James Wan’s Classic Style

“Light Out” is a movie directed by David F. Sandberg in the style and tone of horror’s most marketable voice, James Wan. Wan’s two “Conjuring” movies may easily be the most influential horror movies to have graced the screen. The “Conjuring” movies are variations on the same tune, that of preternatural terror creeping into the insignificant but secure enclosure of a middle class suburban home. The demon grasps God’s powers within these mortgaged walls, and acts in mysterious ways. The exorcists,

“Train to Busan” Surpasses Genre but Dissapoints Sang-ho Fans

“Train to Busan” is a zombie film that yet again explores our collective anxiety that, just maybe, the person sitting next to you who looks, smells and sounds nothing out of the ordinary may succumb to the universal violent impulse to bite your face off. And like many of its more socially conscious kin, it additionally wonders whether tearing off someone’s face is the preeminent moral standard to which we want to hold our species accountable. It’s a film that understands its rails have been skid

“Everybody Wants Some!!” Excites With Brisk Pace, Realistic Period-Detail

Richard Linklater’s “Everybody Wants Some!!” is about a group of college athlete bros attending six parties over the course of three days before classes begin. It is as if the high school students in Linklater’s comedy gold “Dazed and Confused” are now in college, and is probably the best movie I’ve seen in 2016 so far. This statement probably does not appear to mesh well with the synopsis given above. But this movie is only ostensibly about men clowning around. After all, this is the director

Hood’s “Eye in the Sky” Reveals the Moral Ambiguities of Wartime

There is probably no premise in existence more charged with contradictory politics and moral ambiguity than that of a war film. Many directors and screenwriters know that embracing this complexity may hamper the accessibility of the film and choose to evade it through different methods. Some, like Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now,” focus on the individual soldier and the slow, steady bloom of his seething madness amidst the amoral chaos of the battlefield. A disturbing number, like Clint E

Laszlo Neme’s “Son of Saul” Wins Oscar for Best Foreign Film

It is impossible to make a film that accurately portrays the Holocaust as a whole. Its horror is too vast, and its characters too numerous. Cinema’s only available shortcut is to illuminate individual traumas that compose the darkness of the times. Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece “Schindler’s List,” perhaps the most familiar American Holocaust film, fixed its gaze on the struggle of the names written on the infamous List. To a lesser extent, it focused on Oskar Schindler, the brave soul who riske

Lenny Abrahamson’s “Room” is Deemed a Somewhat Unsatisfying Success

There is a certain aesthetic that defines the seasonal outpour of movies that more cynical moviegoers scorn as “Oscar-bait”. The camerawork in such films travels the middle road between subtlety and officiousness, and it is just subdued enough to be impressive. The script is usually open to a range of interpretation and emotion on the part of the main actors, often tinged with sentimentality easily understood by an equally accommodating range of audience members. Most importantly, these movies

Leonardo DiCaprio Depicts Tremendous Suffering in “The Revenant”

To find an Iñárritu film during the cinematic famine that comes around every January is to find an oasis in an oft-traversed desert. The Mexican director has efficiently carved a hobbit hole in the mainstream moviegoer’s consciousness, and “The Revenant” is an unabashedly loud stroke of the chisel that reminds everyone that he is here to stay. The story very loosely follows the real-life account of fur trader Hugh Glass who, against all historical odds, finds love in a Native American tribe. H

Video Game Makers Focus on Gameplay Significantly More Than Story Lines

Video games as a medium have always kept narrative design in their periphery. This is no surprise, given that they were first designed to function as a virtual playground. Game developers have, for the most of the medium’s history, been understandably too busy programming to concentrate on writing. Giving Mario a believable motivation for breaking blocks and collecting coins was a secondary concern as his jump mechanics were polished over the years. But now the year is 2015, and the famous plumb

Straight Outta Conformity: What Makes “Straight Outta Compton” Special

The appeal of the recent biopic “Straight Outta Compton” comes from its momentum. “Straight Outta Compton” is unlike typical frenzied biographical movies that jump from one event to the next in order to showcase the subject’s entire life within a limited timeframe. Unfortunately, these films often sacrifice depth for breadth, leaving many moviegoers entertained but unsatisfied. There are exceptions, of course — “Malcolm X” effectively summarized the events of the activist’s life and “Schindler

Blast From the Past: Review of Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal”

The pages of The Amherst Student are often filled with reviews of the latest blockbusters or indie movies. But if you’re in the mood for something different this weekend, consider watching Ingmar Bergman’s classic 1957 film, “The Seventh Seal.” “The Seventh Seal” is the summation of the auteur director’s inimitable style. Contrary to the popular opinion, it is not a complicated work. The film uses apprehensible symbolism, particularly through Bengt Ekerot’s obvious and enduring personification