Granted that The Glass Castle ends up in a pretty good place by sticking a rather tricky landing in its conclusion, the path to that conclusion is a mess. Loaded with overly obvious symbolism (the foundation the kids dug for the wonderful glass castle their dad was going to build becomes a dump heap), dark plot twists that come completely out of left field (randomly dropping child abuse on an audience 1/2 way through a story is neither good storytelling…

It's good, but it could easily have been so much better. Sheridan's script is just over-the-top symbolic and foreshadowing heavy as Hell or High Water, but it lacks the finesse his former one had. Weak attempts at comic relief don't land at all, the reveal is incredibly anticlimactic, and the moral murkiness of the resolution (so brilliantly handled in Hell or High Water) receives disappointingly short shrift here. Renner is excellent, and the film belongs to him. As much as…

I'm this far behind (two weeks) logging films at Letterboxd, because of Boyhood. I've spent over a week reading positive and negative reviews, trying to pinpoint exactly why the film failed to completely work for me. I liked parts of it - mostly the parts when Mason was a child; but as a whole the film failed to engage me, and I never cared about any of the characters.

Naturally, I am surprised at my lack of enthusiasm for Boyhood,…

"What do you do? It's such a stupid question. I thought I'd ask it."
...
"What do you do?"
"That's such a stupid question. Just kidding. Um, it's kinda hard to explain."
"Because what you do is complicated?"
"Uh, because I don't really do it."

I can't help it; I adore this film. There's no other film I've seen that depicts the challenges of a young artist adjusting to living on their own as hilariously, poignantly, and accurately as Frances…