Email Author Nick Schager

2012 Stories by Nick Schager

• Mulberry Child

  published September 5, 2012

  China's 1960s–1970s Cultural Revolution reverberates through generations in Mulberry Child, a documentary based in part on Jian... More >>

• Keep the Lights On

  published September 5, 2012

  Exhibiting great specificity about gay sexual mores—the phone sex hook-ups, the fear of AIDS, a dichotomy between carefree promiscuity and... More >>

• The Good Doctor

  published August 29, 2012

  Loneliness, lack of respect, and a wholesale absence of ethical standards prove to be a volatile combination in The Good Doctor, Lance... More >>

• The Possession

  published August 29, 2012

  Demonic exorcism is given a perfunctory Jewish twist in The Possession, which delivers second-rate horror clichés unbefitting the... More >>

• Robot & Frank

  published August 15, 2012

  A more hopeful reimagining of 2001's portrait of man-machine relations, Robot & Frank envisions a near future in which automated... More >>

• Red Hook Summer: Stomping Grounds

  published August 8, 2012

  Spike Lee returns to the Brooklyn neighborhoods of his most famous works—including his celebrated Do the Right Thing—with... More >>

• Supercapitalist

  published August 8, 2012

  Even caped do-gooders couldn't save Supercapitalist, a dramatic dud whose title refers not to some big-business hero but rather to... More >>

• Goats

  published August 8, 2012

  David Duchovny hikes around the Tucson desert with his pet goats as the aptly named Goat Man in Goats, the Californication star... More >>

• We Women Warriors

  published August 8, 2012

  Weaving provides a metaphor for the inextricable bond between Colombia's indigenous people and their land and culture—and between the... More >>

• Mosquita y Mari

  published August 1, 2012

  A coming-of-age saga of quiet contemplation, Mosquita y Mari focuses on the growing bond between Yolanda (Fenessa Pineda), a high school... More >>

• Assassin's Bullet

  published August 1, 2012

  Fans of incessant flashbacks and endless whooshing zooms into close-ups will find much to love about Assassin's Bullet; less satisfied,... More >>

• Klown

  published July 25, 2012

  Raunchy dude comedy is hardly the sole province of American cinema, as Klown all too dispiritingly reconfirms. Based on his popular... More >>

• Sacrifice

  published July 25, 2012

  Switched-at-birth sagas don't come much more convoluted than Sacrifice, Chen Kaige's latest period piece epic, about a doctor named... More >>

• Wagner's Dream

  published July 18, 2012

  Exhaustive to the point of being occasionally exhausting, Wagner's Dream charts the audacious efforts of opera director Robert Lepage to... More >>

• Grassroots

  published July 11, 2012

  You can tell outsiders from the establishment by the quality of their facial hair in Grassroots, an adaptation of Phil Campbell’s... More >>

• Drunkboat

  published July 11, 2012

  A film titled Drunkboat that’s bookended by the sights of a bald John Malkovich waking up in an alley trash-bag pile next to a hen... More >>

• Gei Oni

  published July 11, 2012

  Jewish life in 19th century Palestine is depicted as alienating and arduous in Gei Oni, the romanticism-free story of a young mother named... More >>

• Last Ride

  published July 4, 2012

  An Aussie variation on Badlands teeming with desolation, beauty, fear, and the discord between youthful fantasies and grim realities,... More >>

• The Magic of Belle Isle

  published July 4, 2012

  With graceless melodramatist Rob Reiner at the helm, it's predictably ironic that The Magic of Belle Isle champions the unparalleled... More >>

• The Pact

  published July 4, 2012

  There's no pact in The Pact, which is indicative of this faux spooky tale's guiding illogicality. A musty ghost story that morphs into a... More >>

• A Burning Hot Summer

  published June 27, 2012

  Sarkozy-era socioeconomic tensions form the backdrop for romantic entanglement and disintegration in A Burning Hot Summer, Philippe... More >>

• Ikland

  published June 13, 2012

  Still shaken by a childhood reading of anthropologist Colin Turnbull's '60s portrait of Uganda's Ik tribe—whom he dubbed "the worst... More >>

• U.N. Me

  published May 30, 2012

  From its "Oil for Food" scandal in Iraq to its inaction in Rwanda and Darfur and its farcical human rights council appointments, the U.N. is... More >>

• Crooked Arrows

  published May 30, 2012

  Former Superman Brandon Routh neither looks nor convincingly acts the part of an upstate New York Native American in Crooked Arrows, a... More >>

• Mighty Fine: Debbie Goodstein's Sappy Nostalgia

  published May 23, 2012

  As Mighty Fine's Joe Fine, a businessman who relocates his family from Brooklyn to Louisiana in 1974, Chazz Palminteri rages at... More >>