Bernard Boo's Movie Reviews
All movie reviews written by Bernard Boo
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Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
If you, like millions of others, plan on heading into Dawn of the Planet of the Apes this weekend ready to gobble up yet another action-heavy summer mega movie, expect to get way more than you bargained for: Dawn is a sophisticated, emotional picture that explores...
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Code Black
Ryan McGarry’s Code Black, an engrossing documentary about one of the busiest emergency rooms in the country, revolves around the idea that patient-doctor intimacy is a key factor in saving lives, and this intimacy is something the medical industry is quickly...
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Hellion
Boasting grimy imagery, a primal, tightly-written script, and a breakout performance by a promising young newcomer, Kat Candler’s Hellion–an expansion of her 2012 short that tore up the festival circuit–is the best juvenile delinquent film since last year’s indie darling, Destin...
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Yves Saint Laurent
Yves Saint Laurent changed the face of fashion on numerous occasions, innovating through design, expanding the horizons of the art form like few else in the 20th century. Alas, Jalil Lespert’s tribute to the man, Yves Saint Laurent, finds itself constricted...
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Le Chef
For a film about the culinary arts, a world driven by passion, sweat, and sleepless nights, Le Chef is so careless and uninspired it’s borderline upsetting. What’s worse, it fails twofold as a comedy, going for the cheapest, most worn-out gags...
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Begin Again
Following the success of Once, director John Carney was afforded a bigger budget and bigger stars to help him in making Begin Again, his follow-up to the eminently popular music-romance mashup. The result is a delightful, breezy movie that’ll please...
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Deliver Us From Evil
The Bronx is turned into a funhouse of jump scares and buddy cop banter in Deliver Us From Evil, a loose adaptation of Beware the Night by Ralph Sarchie, a former NYPD detective who left the force to enter the creepy world of demonology. Fans of the exorcism subgenre...
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Third Person
The sheer ambition on display in Third Person, from Crash writer-director Paul Haggis, is staggering and admirable without question. It’s actually a very, very rare thing to behold, with Haggis carefully constructing an intricately woven ensemble love story set in three...
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Korengal
One of the greatest films about war of all time, 2010’s gripping documentary Restrepo, co-directed by Sebastian Junger and the late Tim Hetherington (who was killed covering the Libyan civil war in 2011), brought attention to the conflict in Afghanistan...
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A Coffee in Berlin
Like a lost relic from the French New Wave, A Coffee in Berlin dazzles with its melancholic black-and-white imagery and a jazzy soundtrack in line with Woody Allen’s New York ballads, following law school dropout Niko Fischer (Tom Schilling) as he...