Articles by Robert Bell

Timbuktu

Abderrahmane Sissako

PUBLISHED Feb 13, 2015

About 30 minutes into Timbuktu, Abderrahmane Sissako's painfully didactic and wholeheartedly indignant depiction of the fundamentalist atta...

Third Person

Paul Haggis

PUBLISHED Jan 29, 2015

Paul Haggis is the sort of guy you hire to write a screenplay when you have a basic shell and marketing strategy already in place. He has a...

Still Alice

Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland

PUBLISHED Jan 22, 2015

To be clear, Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland's identity drama, Still Alice, isn't a cerebral or particularly complex film. It's an ex...

Girls: Season Three

PUBLISHED Jan 21, 2015

Throughout the first two seasons of Girls, Lena Dunham and team were often resorting to shock tactics in a bid for attention. Though inadve...

Annabelle

John R. Leonetti

PUBLISHED Jan 20, 2015

Spinning off from an anecdotal insert at the beginning of James Wan's far superior haunted house thriller, The Conjuring, Annabelle jumps b...

Lucy

Luc Besson

PUBLISHED Jan 20, 2015

In one of the two supplements included with the Blu-ray release of Luc Besson's highly kinetic and unintentionally amusing actioner, Lucy,...

Two Days, One Night

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

PUBLISHED Jan 15, 2015

Staying true to their aesthetic and thematic auteur trajectory, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's latest work, Two Days, One Night, utilizes p...

The Facts of Life: The Complete Series

PUBLISHED Jan 13, 2015

In the pilot episode of the Diff'rent Strokes spinoff, The Facts of Life, Mrs. Garrett (Charlotte Rae) — ostensibly the chambermaid o...