I Am Woman
Helen Reddy’s story is clearly one that needs to be told, and screenwriter Emma Jensen at least seems to understand that necessity. I Am Woman delivers on that basic promise: to weave the tale of...
View ArticleRevisit: Whip It
Upon its 2009 release, Drew Barrymore’s directorial debut, Whip It, felt like a delightful, inspired and heartwarming journey of a young girl in the process of finding her own individual happiness....
View ArticleRent-a-Pal
David (Brian Landis Folkins), the protagonist of Rent-a-Pal, is the picture of a sadsack loner. He has been the primary caretaker of his long-suffering mother Lucille (Kathleen Brady) since the...
View ArticleThe Secrets We Keep
The Secrets We Keep is certainly an evocative title when you get down to the brass tacks of the plot details, but it is also something of a promise to the audience. Those secrets must be intriguing at...
View ArticleJimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President
Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President somehow manages to stretch a very thin premise – the 39th president really loved rock music – into something more than mere hagiography. Somehow, director Mary...
View ArticleHoly Hell! O Brother, Where Art Thou? Turns 20
While some films fade in significance with time or begin to feel outdated after 20 years, others are more heralds for where the medium is heading. For these rare few, then, two decades of age barely...
View ArticleBlackbird
Families gathering to weather tough events together could be a genre by itself, with films like Lulu Wang’s The Farewell and Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Still Walking studying the close-knit, often chaotic...
View ArticleOeuvre: Miyazaki: Howl’s Moving Castle
Flight is a constant fixation for Hayao Miyazaki, a director for whom part of the power of animation is the ability to open up new avenues of movement across azure, cloud-dappled canvasses. Yet in most...
View ArticleResidue
Few films set in Washington, D.C. use the nation’s capital as more than an obvious backdrop for political intrigue. Even when it’s the setting of some Beltway drama or conspiracy thriller, very little...
View ArticleRed Shoes & the Seven Dwarfs
We all know the story about the princess cursed into a lesser existence until she can kiss (or be on the receiving end of a kiss from) the charming prince of her wildest dreams. But writer-director...
View ArticleTen Minutes To Midnight
On a dark hurricane-battered night, something strange is afoot at a local Wisconsin radio station. It’s not the usual night-shift oddness and staff hijinks, but something altogether more significant: a...
View ArticleAlone
America feels more dangerous than ever. White supremacists plot armed rebellion in the hinterlands while activists on both sides of the political spectrum clash on city streets. But in horror movies,...
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Revisit: The Elephant Man
David Lynch’s return to television in 2017 was for many an explosive triumph that upended the expectations and expanded the possibilities of serial drama. Yet in a career of multiple peaks and valleys,...
View ArticleShortcut
Horror characters and ill-advised decisions are well-acquainted bedfellows. In Alessio Liguori’s Shortcut, the fateful decision is right in the name. But by the end, you may be using that title to...
View ArticleThe Nest
The second feature from Sean Durkin (who previously directed Martha Marcy May Marlene and a Sharon Van Etten music video , The Nest depicts a combative marriage and the messy domestic life that rears...
View ArticleCriminally Underrated: Maleficent
In 1959, Disney introduced one of the great villains of cinema with the evil queen Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty, an animated feature adapted from Charles Perrault’s classic Mother Goose tale, “La...
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Oeuvre: Miyazaki: Ponyo
The story of a fish mutating into a hominid after consuming human blood doesn’t exactly sound like a recipe for family-friendly whimsy, but in the hands of Hayao Miyazaki we get just that with his...
View ArticleKajillionaire
It is hard to believe that 15 years have passed since Miranda July made a name for herself with Me and You and Everyone We Know an indie gem that appeared to establish her as a triple threat...
View ArticleThe Devil All the Time
The final scene of Antonio Campos’ latest film finds protagonist Arvin Russell (Tom Holland) yawning tremendously and falling asleep in the passenger’s seat of a car. If at this point you haven’t...
View ArticleOttolenghi and the Cakes of Versailles
Right in the middle of this documentary, which is purportedly meant to be about the unifying strength of food in the context of a museum event, there is an unexpected, mostly unwelcome, and entirely...
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