Enemy Lines
There’s a brutal moment near the end of Enemy Lines when it becomes clear that not even the good guys can be sure exactly who is on whose side in this tale of secret missions to extract a nuclear...
View ArticleRediscover: His Motorbike, Her Island
A nation with more than its share of strictly coded subcultures, Japan has for decades boasted a robust biker community, the popularity of which peaked in the early 1980s. This world forms the basis...
View ArticleA White, White Day
Icelandic film A White, White Day shifts from thriller to character study repeatedly. It is superb as the latter and adequate enough at the former for the suspense elements to add some juice to the...
View ArticleGhost Town Anthology
Despite the mysterious title, Denis Côté’s Ghost Town Anthology isn’t a horror anthology. Rather, the title refers to an unusual narrative structure used to depict community and collectivity in the...
View ArticleTrue History of the Kelly Gang
Justin Kurzel’s True History of the Kelly Gang is a visually stunning and sensationally acted telling of the life of the legendary Australian outlaw Ned Kelly. Kurzel’s version of Kelly’s story is...
View ArticleBad Education
The structures shaping US society are fundamentally broken. The conventional wisdom says that to get a good job, one must attend a good college; to attend a good college, one must attend a good high...
View ArticleThousand Pieces of Gold
The cinematic landscape has changed dramatically over the last few months, leading distributors and cinemas to innovate change in order the survive while people are away from physical cineplexes. One...
View ArticleHoly Hell: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Turns 20
I still remember asking my parents to make the two-hour drive down to Pittsburgh to take me to see Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon while it was still in limited release. As a 15-year-old, I...
View ArticleOeuvre: Dario Argento: Phenomena
Phenomena, like many Argento films, takes an image-first approach to the art of cinema. It grants a privileged position to images (especially visceral ones), which are also the raison d’être for its...
View ArticleDeerskin
For all its gruff bluster, the male ego can be a fragile thing. French absurdist director Quentin Dupieux adds a surrealist bent to a midlife crisis in Deerskin, presenting the fixations and...
View ArticlePorno
In most pornography, much of the titillation comes from the thrill of seeing something you’re not meant to see. From the outset, the new horror thriller Porno seems enamored with turning that sensation...
View ArticleThe Wretched
Witches are often a problem for Hollywood. Tonally, the canvas is just too broad. There’s the potential for elegant historical horror (see 2015’s The Witch), youthful adventure (such as 1990’s The...
View ArticleBull
In Annie Silverstein’s directorial debut, Bull, an unlikely friendship functions as the centerpiece in an honest and raw look at rodeo life and the everyday pain from which it serves as a distraction....
View ArticleLiberté
The still countryside and faint chirping of birds and insects that forms the backdrop of Albert Serra’s Liberté are instantly undermined by a nobleman’s monologue about the heinous torture and...
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Rediscover: The Cloud-Capped Star
Some films require historical context. Without certain specific knowledge, they can lose their power, their greatness. Though barely mentioned, the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan looms like an...
View ArticleJames vs His Future Self
Time travel stories are often about regret, and it should be no surprise that there has been an escalation in such stories in novels and movies given the times we live in. The subgenre hasn’t reached...
View ArticleThe Infiltrators
There’s an unfortunate truth that the plight of undocumented immigrants in the US is easy to ignore for citizens shielded from its inherent tragedy and persistently manipulated by tired media...
View ArticleWorking Man
Late capitalism, which is fully globalized, financial rather than industrial and well beyond the bounds of decency and dignity that could restrain its avarice desires, is beguiling. It is as totalizing...
View ArticleTesnota (Closeness)
The first 15 minutes of Tesnota, Russian director Kantemir Balagov’s feature debut, suggest that its central theme will be togetherness. Its opening scene gives us twentysomething Ilana Koft (Darya...
View ArticleCriminally Underrated: Uptown Girls
Last year marked the 10th anniversary of Brittany Murphy’s premature death. While there was some commemoration of the beloved star across niche sections of social media, the anniversary was fairly...
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