Volition
Cinema as a medium lends itself to playing around with time. Just as the cut between shots in a film creates meaning, it also allows filmmakers to mess up chronology and time. It is no coincidence,...
View ArticleBloody Nose, Empty Pockets
The latest film from documentarian brothers Bill and Turner Ross (Tchoupitoulas) is a loving look at the last night of a Las Vegas dive bar. Or is it? Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets looks for all the world...
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Revisit: Marriage Story
Love and all its messy imperfections are placed under the microscope in Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, which is both the writer-director’s finest film and his most transparently reflective. The...
View ArticleRelic
It’s the burden of children to watch their parents die. One of the worst ways is a disease such as Alzheimer’s that slowly chips away until there is nothing left but a shell. They don’t call it the...
View ArticleArchive
The 2009 science fiction film Moon lives in the DNA of the Archive, as writer-director Gavin Rothery worked on Duncan Jones’ debut as a production designer. Boxy robots J1 and J2, reminiscent of...
View ArticleHoly Hell! You Can Count on Me Turns 20
One of the unexpected melancholies of watching Kenneth Lonergan’s directorial debut, You Can Count on Me, is how much it acts as a marker in the visual depiction of suburbia. Released in 2000 after a...
View ArticleGhosts of War
It is difficult to know where to begin with Ghosts of War, a new thriller from writer-director Eric Bress. The film at first appears for all the world to be a typical haunted-mansion movie, but Bress...
View ArticleOeuvre: Argento: Giallo
It’s both fitting that Dario Argento would name one of his films after the genre he helped launch internationally and infuriating that he would presume to give such an encompassing title to arguably...
View ArticleThe Sunlit Night
The opening shot of The Sunlit Night confronts the viewer with the direct gaze of three unimpressed critics. They hum and cluck and shake their heads, and they end up saying unkind things about a...
View ArticleMost Wanted
Two stories are told in Most Wanted, and it’s plain to see that writer-director Daniel Roby cannot choose which to prioritize. The screenplay is based on the true stories of Alain Olivier, a heroin...
View ArticleRevisit: Catch Me If You Can
For someone taking a casual glance at Steven Spielberg’s storied filmography, 2002’s Catch Me If You Can could be easy to overlook. At the dawn of the new millennium, it came hot on the heels of two...
View ArticleThe Painted Bird
The Painted Bird not only portrays war as hell, it puts the viewer through a gauntlet of increasingly tortuous scenes in order to more directly experience that hell. For some viewers, there may be no...
View ArticleFrom the Vaults of Streaming Hell: Alexandria…Why?
The second World War is often remembered as a cataclysmic confrontation between good and evil, the global carnage it engendered raising the conflict’s stakes to an epic pitch. Yet in addition to...
View ArticleBlessed Child
When we first meet Cara Jones in her documentary Blessed Child, she’s anxious about a pending performance. Some instinct leads to the correct assumption that she’s going to a Moth storytelling slam,...
View ArticleOeuvre: Argento: Dracula 3D
For a filmmaker who helped pioneer the visual grammar of modern horror and who would reliably frame and photograph well when his scripts failed him, Dario Argento barely delivers a functioning movie...
View ArticleRadioactive
If nothing else, Marjane Satrapi’s Radioactive does find ways to visually complicate the usual biopic drabness. With cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, the closest thing the digital era has to a Jack...
View ArticleA Deadly Legend
Far too many characters come together for a housewarming party and are terrorized by an ancient demon spirit for no reason in A Deadly Legend, a pedestrian supernatural horror film that suggests a low...
View ArticleThe Rental
In his directorial debut, Dave Franco imbues well-worn horror tropes with distinctly modern anxieties, capitalizing on the inherently strange dynamic of renting someone else’s personal home through...
View ArticleFirst Cow
Director Kelly Reichardt is a singular voice in American cinema, and it almost feels like a miracle, not only that she’s able to make films, but that her work has found ever bigger audiences and...
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Revisit: Matewan
“The Prince of Darkness is upon the land,” rails a preacher near the beginning of Matewan (1987). “Now in the Bible his name is Beezlebub, Lord of the Flies. Right now on Earth today, his name is...
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