Bernard Boo's Movie Reviews
All movie reviews written by Bernard Boo
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Next Goal Wins
The story at the center of sports doc Next Goal Wins is classic underdog material: American Samoa’s national football (soccer) team is notorious for suffering one of the worst losses in the history of the sport, losing to Australia 31-0 in 2001....
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Watermark
Filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Edward Burtynsky (Manufactured Landscapes) bottle the immense power and omnipresence of water, earth’s mightiest element, in their stunningly cinematic film Watermark. Assembling jaw-dropping footage of rivers, dams, rice paddies, abalone farms, and more, they’ve created a...
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Only Lovers Left Alive
You couldn’t ask for two actors better suited to play a couple of sharp-featured, hipster vampire lovers than Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston, two actors who’ve hit the absolute peak of coolness at this point in their respective careers....
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Under the Skin
Jonathan Glazer’s otherworldly Under the Skin feels somehow…forbidden. Hyper-artistic movies like this are a rare species, unwelcome in the tentpole Hollywood landscape. And yet, at the center of the film is one of the most recognizable young actresses in the industry, Scarlett...
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The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden
Paradise goes up in flames in The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden, a stranger-than-fiction murder mystery in documentary form. There’s something fascinatingly bizarre about the events surrounding the unexplained deaths that struck a handful of bickering European settlers that...
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Cuban Fury
Nick Frost, best known as Simon Pegg’s tubby partner in crime in the “Cornetto Trilogy” (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, The World’s End), casts his own shadow in Cuban Fury, an amiable dance-infused rom-com that dazzles and charms despite missing a...
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On My Way
What’s surprising about On My Way, a latter-life crisis road trip film starring Catherine Deneuve, is that the film flounders and fumbles while the French living legend is alone at the helm. Only when a talented young actor (Nemo Schiffman)...
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The Raid 2: Berandal
Welsh-born filmmaker Gareth Evans’ The Raid: Redemtion shook up the martial arts movie genre in 2011 with its exhilarating action, scintillating fight choreography, and no-holds-barred brutality. The film didn’t have much of a plot to speak of: A police raid...
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Rob the Mob
Rob the Mob opens with a robbery, but not the perilous kind the title suggests: In early 1990’s New York, Tommy and Rosie (Michael Pitt and Nina Arianda, both delivering terrific turns), a frantic, foul-mouthed young couple, botch a...
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Jodorowsky’s Dune
In Jodorowsky’s Dune, a documentary about Alejandro Jodorowsky’s failed 1970’s adaptation of the acclaimed sci-fi novel by Frank Herbert, the Chilean-born director–essentially a talking head throughout the film–is more captivating in his musings than most actors are in sweeping, Oscar-bait dramas....