Mob Town
Across cultures and languages, gangster movies are usually about the gangsters. While this can often be seen as glorifying criminals who steal, cheat and murder—especially in a society too literal for...
View ArticleBombshell
For a movie about the bravery necessary for victims of sexual assault and harrassment in the #MeToo movement to come forward and speak truth to power, Bombshell, a film about the women Roger Ailes...
View ArticleLittle Women
Like a warm, buttery holiday meal, Greta Gerwig’s Little Women is, above all else, comfortable and indulgent. It is at times eye-rollingly earnest and Gerwig’s back-and-forth approach to the story’s...
View ArticleUncut Gems
The hollowness of materialism is on full display in the Safdie brothers’ anxiety-inducing Uncut Gems. Frenetic jeweler and gambling addict Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler) incessantly prowls for the next...
View ArticleCats
Tom Hooper’s film adaptation of the love-it-or-love-to-hate-it Broadway classic Cats is so eager to be loved that it forgets to be anything else. The actors—whose faces are creepily human while their...
View ArticleA Hidden Life
For many of those viewers who have felt increasingly alienated by Terrence Malick’s increasingly alienating work over the past decade, the director’s latest film, A Hidden Life, seemed to suggest a...
View ArticleStar Wars: The Rise of Skywalker
Four years ago, when J.J. Abrams’ The Force Awakens broke box office records, all it truly had to do was recapture the general grandeur of Star Wars for a new audience without pissing off the old one...
View ArticleOeuvre: Tarkovsky: Ivan’s Childhood
The generation of filmmakers that emerged in the Soviet Bloc in the years of the Khrushchev Thaw (early ’50s-early ’60s) had all come of age during the Second World War and its centrality in shaping...
View ArticleUnderwater
William Eubank’s highly derivative but enjoyable Underwater gathers from a number of sources to create a familiar but effective monster thriller. It’s a lower-IQ cross between Alien and The Abyss,...
View Article1917
While Hollywood has examined World War II from every possible angle, how many films about the first World War can you name? Take a moment and without doing a Google search, see how many you can come up...
View ArticleThree Christs
After the film sat on the shelf for nearly three whole years, IFC Films is dropping Jon Avnet’s Three Christs into the January dumping grounds. Its premise—a doctor studies three schizophrenics who...
View ArticleInherit the Viper
With its initially alarmist approach to the subject matter, the domestic crime drama Inherit The Viper seems like it’s going to be a maudlin dissection of the opioid crisis, the sort of low-on-pulp...
View ArticleRediscover: Daddy Longlegs
With Uncut Gems garnering much-deserved awards season buzz, it’s the perfect time to rediscover 2009’s Daddy Longlegs, also known as Go Get Some Rosemary, the first official directorial effort credited...
View ArticleLes Misérables
Hubris is one hell of a thing, and there’s plenty to spare in Ladj Ly’s compelling debut feature, Les Misérables. Performative pride courses through every vein of this movie as we examine the quotidian...
View ArticleDolittle
In the wake of the exceptionally weird disaster that was Cats, any average studio misfire is going to look like The Godfather by comparison. But if it were released in a January dumping ground further...
View ArticleBad Boys for Life
In 1995, Bad Boys helped propel Martin Lawrence and Will Smith, then still TV leads, into movie stardom, alongside a Michael Bay who at the time probably never thought about the logistics of a car...
View ArticleOeuvre: Tarkovsky: Andrei Rublev
For his second film, Tarkovsky did not mess around, composing a massive three-hour-long epic about medieval Eurasia and the rise of the Russian Empire. He takes on some of the most poignant themes...
View ArticleWeathering with You
Makoto Shinkai’s films contain some of the finest animation in contemporary anime, a blend of photorealistic detail with impressionistic light and color that renders Japan as a place both tactile and...
View ArticleRevisit: Clerks 2
Clerks 2 is Kevin Smith’s masterpiece. It is a story about second chances for the two sets of heterosexual male life mates that launched the New Jersey native’s career, Dante Hicks and Randal Graves...
View ArticleThe Host
Some films are bad in a so-bad-they’re-good way (looking at you, Cats) and others are bad because they take big risks and simply fail to execute them well. And then some films are just not very good in...
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