Bernard Boo's Movie Reviews
All movie reviews written by Bernard Boo
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Stories We Tell
“Every family has a story.” Canadian actor and director Sarah Polley (Away From Her, Take This Waltz) lost her mom, Diane, to cancer in 1990. In Stories We Tell, her quietly spectacular documentary, she sits with her family and...
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Simon Killer
In Simon Killer, director Antonio Campos plays provocateur, giving us a protagonist who becomes so unlikable, so repulsive, you’re sure to leave the theater full of hatred and contempt for him. Campos’ film is thoroughly distressing, an exercise in...
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Evil Dead (2013)
As I watched a demon-possessed girl split her own tongue in half with a rusty boxcutter, and then proceed to partake in the most disgusting French kiss I’ve ever seen, I was so overwhelmed with disgust that I forgot...
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Someone I Used to Know
After several years, three childhood friends meet on a summer night at a Los Angeles night club to reminisce and have a nostalgic chat over drinks. Danny has become a wealthy pervert, Luke is now a heartthrob movie star,...
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The We and the I
High schoolers are at the most vulnerable and volatile stage in life, teetering on the precipice of adulthood. Full of insecurity, they cling to each other to form cliques in fear that they might be judged by others. They...
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Like Someone in Love
Abbas Kiarostami’s gift is his ability to elicit feelings in his audience from the inside out; he sneaks into our subconscious, plants a seed that germinates and grows slowly—at his pace, specifically—and eventually flourishes into a flood of emotion,...
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Happy People: A Year in the Taiga
Werner Herzog chops up and rearranges footage from a Russian television documentary about Bakhtia, a remote Siberian village on the Yenisei river, and provides his signature lyrical narration that elevates the footage into a moving examination of strength,...
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The Ghastly Love of Johnny X (SF IndieFest)
A decade in-the-making, The Ghastly Love of Johnny X is a retro-tinted window into the mind of director Paul Bunnell, mashing together influences from sci-fi B-movie flicks like Flash Gordon and musicals like The Rocky Horror Picture Show and...
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The Story of Luke (SF IndieFest)
After the great success of the eminently popular Juno and Little Miss Sunshine, there was a deluge of similarly suburban, witty comedies that followed. These indie dramedies, while often good, haven’t stimulated me in a long time. They tend...
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Ghosts with Shit Jobs (SF IndieFest)
Directors Chris McCawley, Jim Morrison, Jim Munroe, and Tate Young’s take on the dehumanization and sterilization of North Americans is inventive, but Ghosts with Shit Jobs often falls flat in its attempts at any significant humor or drama. While...