Oeuvre: Hayao Miyazaki: Castle in the Sky
Premiering in 1986, Castle in the Sky represents a foundational benchmark for contemporary animation, a position attained not only by its status as the first Studio Ghibli release. Easing back on the...
View ArticleJazz on a Summer’s Day
The first images of Jazz on a Summer’s Day are of reflections of Newport piers in disturbed water. Boats and buoys become abstract squiggles of red and blue undulating and stretching as the gentle...
View ArticleBoys State
Before the opening-credits montage, we receive a grave warning from Boys State regarding the phenomenon of splitting the political establishment into two parties. The first comes via a quote on a title...
View ArticleSkin: A History of Nudity in Movies
Back in the hoary days of the first expansion of cable television, the cable box marked your family as people of means and scrutinizers of entertainment. Said mechanism sat atop a boxy old boob-tube,...
View ArticleRediscover: Hooper
An aging Hollywood stuntman drives around a bygone Los Angeles, relaxing in his trailer with a beer after a punishing day of crashing cars, fist fighting and mouthing off. But this isn’t last year’s...
View ArticleSputnik
We think we know the nature of the threat in Sputnik with its opening scene. The year is 1983, and in Soviet-controlled Kazakhstan, a spacecraft has crash-landed after a day of radio silence. A local...
View ArticleSpree
For Kurt Kunkle (Joe Keery), the protagonist of {Spree}, the only kind of recognition is the kind that requires a social media presence. “You don’t exist,” he says of those who are not in the world of...
View ArticleCriminally Underrated: Mirror Mirror
The early 2010s were an odd time for fantasy films and fairy tale retellings. The success of the Twilight franchise in the late 2000s ushered in a new market and demand for fantasies and fairy tales...
View ArticlePariah Dog
The feature documentary debut from director-cinematographer-editor Jesse Alk, Pariah Dog, will break your heart. The many hats that the Ottawa-born filmmaker wears is crucial. While the core topic is a...
View ArticleCut Throat City
While Wu-Tang founding member RZA’s previous films have shown something of a chasm between his uneven direction and his virtuosic body of work as a musician, he still possesses a stylish charm as a...
View ArticleOeuvre: Hayao Miyazaki: My Neighbor Totoro
My Neighbor Totoro is a perfect film. Even for very young viewers, its visuals and vibrant characters will delight regardless of language comprehension, but the older you get, the more powerful this...
View ArticleThe Pale Door
The Pale Door features a promising premise. The setting is the Old West, where a gang of train robbers find respite in a ghost town run by a coven of honest-to-goodness, real-life witches, who were...
View ArticleUnhinged
Out of all the filmic tropes out there, one of the most stressful is when a driver of a car looks at their passenger (or worse, the backseat) for long enough that you begin to fear they’re going to be...
View ArticleHard Kill
An instantly forgettable, shockingly low-budget action-thriller, Hard Kill banks on our recognition of Bruce Willis’ past career (the callback nature of the title should indicate that) and almost...
View ArticleTesla
For the uninitiated, Nikola Tesla was America’s “greatest inventor you never heard of” until the 1990s, about a century after the height of his career. While an important inventor and creator of...
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Revisit: Cold War
The bulk of Cold War, Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski’s 2018 Academy Award-nominated film, exists in the quiet peripheries. The economical tale of a doomed love affair may stretch over the decades...
View ArticleCoup 53
As a population, Americans are probably the least historically-informed citizenry in the world community. This is particularly true when it comes to the various foreign policy machinations of the US...
View ArticleNomad
A rambunctious radical with no real battles left to fight, Werner Herzog enters the sixth decade of his career as a shadow of his former self. Still ostensibly carrying the banner for the mad, macho...
View ArticleFrom the Vaults of Streaming Hell: Deadcon
More films are plumbing the boundless world of social media influencer culture for cinematic plot fodder. A movie like this summer’s Spree luxuriates in the iconography and detail-laden trappings of...
View ArticleThe Vanished
Every now and then, a bad film comes along that’s worth watching simply in order to marvel at its stunning ineptitude. Some combination of outlandish plot, wooden script, flailing actors or misguided...
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