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Rediscover: Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Céline Sciamma’s masterfully constructed and achingly romantic film, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, begins with close-ups of easels where art students sketch our protagonist, Marianne (Noémie Merlant)....
View ArticlePicture of His Life
There’s a sad irony in a documentary about an underwater photographer renowned for capturing striking images of dangerous creatures in their natural environments feeling so contrived. Israeli-born...
View ArticleBully. Coward. Victim: The Story of Roy Cohn
Infamous lawyer and power broker Roy Cohn was a complicated individual, but the new documentary chronicling his life puts so much focus on capturing each facet of his tale that the finished product is...
View ArticleThe Ghost of Peter Sellers
One of the most gifted comedic actors of the 20th century, Peter Sellers was notoriously difficult to work with in the best of times. His erratic behavior and reportedly poor (and untreated) mental...
View ArticleHoly Hell! Wonder Boys Turns 20
For the entirety of Wonder Boys, things simply happen to Grady Tripp (Michael Douglas), its protagonist. That is both a synopsis of the entirety of the plot, adapted from Michael Chabon’s novel by...
View ArticleOeuvre: Argento: The Card Player
By the time 2004 rolled around, other filmmakers had been making better Dario Argento than Argento himself for the better part of a decade. Unfortunately, the director reaches a career low with The...
View ArticleIrresistible
Maybe we don’t need Jon Stewart back after all. During his 15-year residency on “The Daily Show,” the comedian offered a more incisive look at the news than most regular broadcast journalism provided,...
View ArticleaTypical Wednesday
Writer-director J. Lee does a pretty fantastic job of ignoring, explaining away or otherwise evading the major emotional, professional and interpersonal issues faced by the protagonist of aTypical...
View ArticleHouse of Hummingbird
From the opening minutes of House of Hummingbird through most of its nearly two-and-a-half-hour duration, teenage protagonist Eun-hee (Park Ji-hu) seems on the verge of detonation or defeat. In the...
View ArticleSki Bum: The Warren Miller Story
Some lucky bastards grow up in Colorado or California or Vancouver. These select few get to take the adventure sports playgrounds that are their backyards for granted and can spend their teenage years...
View ArticleSkyman
With Skyman, Daniel Myrick, writer and co-director of The Blair Witch Project, has returned to the genre he helped popularize: the faux documentary created with supposed found footage. This time...
View ArticleFollowed
There’s a whole laundry list of genre entries stretching the limits of the found footage concept within the confines of the horror film. But of all of these, Followed, a two year-old feature finally...
View ArticleWelcome to Chechnya
One of the most violence-riven places in the world over the past three decades is the small Caucasian Muslim region of Chechnya. When the Soviet Union split into its many constituent parts in 1991,...
View ArticleThe Outpost
Screenwriters Paul Tamasy and Eric Johnson present us with a no-win scenario for the United States Army in The Outpost, a stirring dramatization of a mission that somehow overcame its own odds. In...
View ArticleHamilton
Live theater is fundamentally anti-populist, undemocratic. The room where a performance happens is always restricted by time and place, not to mention a ticket price. Depending on the show, that...
View ArticleI, Pastafari
What can be achieved by suing for the right to wear a colander on one’s head on a government-issued ID? The “pious” folks featured in I, Pastafari: A Flying Spaghetti Monster Story would have you...
View ArticleThe Truth
The Truth, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s first film outside Japan, finds the director at once retaining his style and adapting it to the tropes of French cinema. At its center is an aging screen icon, Fabienne...
View ArticleOeuvre: Argento: Mother of Tears
Loosely based on Thomas De Quincey’s 1845 collection of prose poems/essays Suspiria de Profundis, Mother of Tears is the third and final film in Dario Argento’s “Three Mothers” trilogy. In terms of...
View ArticleJohn Lewis: Good Trouble
John Lewis must be exhausted by the end of each day. If one is to believe John Lewis: Good Trouble, the former-activist-turned-congressman is lauded and thanked nearly every moment for his role in...
View ArticleMoney Plane
One of the small graces of having the glut of high-concept Hollywood movies postponed since April is the space that has been made for independent film. An impressive roster of smaller budget films has...
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