When the late, great website The Dissolve ended operations, it’s commenting community had The Solute to call home, but the staff and writers of The Dissolve have been scattered to the winds of the Internet. With Dissolve On, we collect some of the essential film writing being done by these essential film writers. Because there’s always a Dissolver writing something notable about the movies (and other stuff) somewhere on the Internet.  

These folks are talented and prolific, so if we missed a piece, share it with us in the comments!

 

Scott Tobias on Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig for Slate:

“Asked about Gerwig’s distinguishing qualities, Baumbach emphasizes her spontaneity. “You want every actor to be as ‘in the moment’ as possible, but Greta has a way of approaching every take as if it’s the first time,” he says over the phone. “And I tend to do a lot of them. Whatever’s particular to that moment and that take will inform how she plays it, in a way that’s so alive and exciting. She’s in control and out of control at the same time.”

Scott Tobias on Molly Moon and the Incredible Book of Hypnotism for Variety:

“All Harry Potter comparisons aside, “Molly Moon” harks back to more hidebound traditions in family entertainment. It does nothing to rethink the cliches of fictional orphanages with wicked headmistresses, thin gruel and ragamuffins clothed in filthy, ill-fitting hand-me-downs. And poor Monaghan is left to clown around like the slapstick villains in an old Disney live-action comedy, the types who wind up waist-deep in raw sewage or take swift kicks to the shins. As the one kind caregiver in the orphanage, Emily Watson takes an early exit from these generic kid-pic shenanigans: She gets high billing, but barely sticks around long enough to get knocked down a flight of stairs.”

 

Tasha Robinson on Sinister for Chicagoist:

“For its first-ever movie screening, the historic cemetery on North Pulaski Road has selected Sinister, a supernatural, true-crime-esque 2012 film that has a sequel coming to theaters soon.  Watch people battle ghost children, evil spirits and the threat of insanity on screen while surrounded by a century-old cemetery founded by Bohemian, Moravian and Slovak immigrants escaping religious persecution in the late 1800s.”

Tasha Robinson on Sense8 for NPR’s Monkey See blog:

“As a Sense8 fan, I’ve gone back and forth between being thrilled over the show’s intellectual ambition and fantastic action and frustrated with its broadness and lack of focus — a strength/weakness combination that’s plagued the Wachowskis’ projects since the latter two Matrix movies. So here are a few things I’d like to see out ofSense8’s next season, and its future in general: … “

 

Keith Phipps on Some Call It Loving for Oscilloscope Laboratories blog:

“The first time I came across Some Call It Loving it scared me. Or, more accurately, its VHS box disturbed me with its image of two women—one of them bald and almost alien in appearance—cradling each other in bed. Above them: the title of the film rendered in an almost-sinister font. Dropped awkwardly next to them: The image of a disheveled Richard Pryor. Though we grew up deep in the Ohio suburbs of the 1980s, my friends and I had the fortune to live near a video store whose owner had adventurous tastes.”

Keith Phipps on Transgender representation for The Daily Beast:

“I asked Andreas Stoehr, a trans woman film critic based in Michigan, what [Dressed To Kill] got wrong about the experience of trans women. She struggled to find anything it got right. “Elliott’s pathology—‘opposite sexes inhabiting the same body’—bears minimal resemblance to the experiences of actual trans women,” Soehr replied. “Instead, it reads as a conflation of trans identity with dissociative identity disorder.”

Keith Phipps on The Black Stallion for The Daily Beast:

“An adaptation of Walter Farley’s beloved 1941 novel—which spawned 16 sequels—The Black Stallion is the film [Carroll] Ballard was destined to make, even if it came to him by accident. “I grew up in a frontier, pretty much wilderness area,” Ballard tells critic Scott Foundas in an interview included on the Criterion Blu-ray and DVD. “As a kid it was experiencing the world in a very direct way. And to me that was one of the most important, formative aspects of my life.”

 

Noel Murray on Fly Away Home for the AV Club:

“Carroll Ballard made his feature-directing debut with 1979’s The Black Stallion, an adaptation of Walter Farley’s coming-of-age novel, converted by Ballard and cinematographer Caleb Deschanel into a lovely, stirring explication of mankind’s place in the natural world. Ballard and Deschanel then reunited for 1996’s Fly Away Home, another adaption that finds a personal angle on someone else’s story. Fly Away Home is based on Canadian inventor and naturalist Bill Lishman’s memoirFather Goose: One Man, A Gaggle Of Geese, And Their Real Life Incredible Journey South, a book about how he trained a flock of birds to migrate behind one of his ultralight aircrafts.”

Noel Murray on the music videos of Jonathan Demme for Movie Mezzanine:

“This basic concept comes together best in the video for Springsteen’s “Streets Of Philadelphia,” shot in conjunction with Demme’s Oscar-winning melodrama Philadelphia. Springsteen walks through actual Philadelphia streets, and sings his lyrics live to a pre-recorded music track. This approach takes the in-the-moment feel that Demme prefers for his music videos and weaves it between what amounts to a documentary sketch of a city that knows both squalor and hope…

This has always been Demme’s strength as a director: his ability to orchestrate moments that feel heightened, and yet are remarkably savvy about where people live and what they do.”

 

Sam Adams on Ricki and The Flash for Criticwire:

“That washed-up weariness might seem far from Streep’s steel-hard essence, but she’s closer to home when playing the (largely absent) mother to real-life daughter Mamie Gummer, whose nervous breakdown throws Streep’s Ricki and her estranged family back together. Diablo Cody’s script, according to early reviews, feels an awful lot like her underseen “Young Adult,” but Demme, directing his first fiction film in seven years, lets music carry the story whenever he can, effectively blending narrative and concert documentary, as he did with “Rachel Getting Married.”

 

Nathan Rabin on Call Me Lucky for Boston.com:

“Over the past-quarter century, Goldthwait has built an impressive resume as a bona fide auteur as quietly as possible for a filmmaker whose incendiary yet humane comedies prominently involve such loud, provocative elements as alcoholic, misanthropic clowns (Shakes The Clown), dearly regretted acts of bestiality (Sleeping Dogs Lie), accidental teenage death through auto-erotic asphyxiation (World’s Greatest Dad), and a killing spree-prompted contempt for the excesses of American popular culture (God Bless America).

Nathan Rabin on The Donald and The Exit for the great Scarecrow Video blog:

“Watching the debate, it felt as if Trump was perversely running for President partially as a populist hero and partially as a sneering billionaire villain. It was actually much easier to imagine Trump as the bad guy in a Three Amigos reboot starring Seth Rogen, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and James Franco, or as the billionaire industrialist out to shut down the teen rec center in a breakdancing movie from the 1980s than it was to imagine Trump conducting official business from the White House in his capacity as the President of the United States.”

 

Genevieve Koski on Mission: Impossible – Rouge Nation for GQ.com:

“With Rogue Nation, McQuarrie and Cruise—who hand-picked his Jack Reacher director/Edge of Tomorrow writer to direct the new film—have ratified the current Mission: Impossible formula and proven its potential for long-haul franchisedom (assuming Cruise doesn’t run out of whatever magical serum is keeping him spry and insurable well into his 50s).”

Genevieve Koski with Scott Tobias hosting Filmspotting; this was from the other week but I thought it was great –  the minutes are:

:00-2:32 – Billboard / MUBI
2:32-28:44 – Review: “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation”
Music: Heartless Bastards, “Gates of Dawn”
30:05-39:12 – Notes / Polls
39:12-52:57 – Review: “Stanford Prison Experiment”
Music: Heartless Bastards, “Journey”
54:22-1:10:35 – Top 5: Exciting Movie Trends
1:10:35-1:13:32 – Close