Hitchcock/Truffaut
There is nary a better book for helping someone understand the artfulness (as opposed to entertainment value) of cinema than Hitchcock/Truffaut, the series of interviews of the American “master of...
View ArticleMustang
No matter how formulaic, coming-of-age movies can be endearing even if it’s the same scenario you’ve seen unfold on screen again and again. With every year and every hormone-fueled teen picture...
View ArticleFrom the Vaults of Streaming Hell: The Brainiac
Among many other concurrent identities, the mid ‘50s through early ‘60s represent the golden age of the classic monster movie, with the cumulative guilt, grief and uncertainty of buttoned-down...
View ArticleOeuvre: Craven: Shocker
At first blush, Shocker cannot help but come off like a retread of A Nightmare on Elm Street. Its first act flits between terrifying dreams and their inexplicable impact on reality. Instead of...
View ArticleMacbeth
“Fair is foul, and foul is fair,” the witches whisper in the mist. Foreshadowing chaos to come, it’s one of the famous lines of Macbeth, Shakespeare’s great tragedy about one man’s ambitious rise to...
View ArticleKrampus
The holidays are hell in Michael Dougherty’s horror-comedy Krampus, in which a dysfunctional family is terrorized by the title beastie, an Alpine folklore figure that’s pretty much the antithesis of...
View ArticleLife
In its March 7, 1955 issue, Life magazine ran a photo spread of James Dean, a largely unknown young actor whose first major role was about to have its premiere. Branding the East of Eden heartthrob...
View ArticleRediscover: The Miners’ Hymns
The Miners’ Hymns deserves recognition as the best documentary released this decade. The film’s relatively maligned state—maligned in the sense that too few have seen the film; those who have praise it...
View ArticleChi-Raq
An unexpected contender has joined J.J. Abrams’ Star Wars and Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters as the most feverishly prejudged film in recent memory: Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq. The gadfly director had, like Abrams...
View ArticleEvery Thing Will Be Fine
“All you give me are platitudes!” The same complaint could be leveled, or violently thrown, at Every Thing Will Be Fine, a disaster of a film on every level that makes one wonder if Wim Wenders hasn’t...
View ArticleCold Deck
A poker heist is a fairly unoriginal premise for a feature, but the low-budget Canadian flick Cold Deck is riddled with clichés. Its protagonist is the broody, compulsive gambler Bobby (Stéfano Gallo)...
View ArticleOeuvre: Craven: The People Under the Stairs
Wes Craven establishes the context of The People Under the Stairs with impressive concision. It begins with close-ups scanning tarot cards as one child explains the meaning of the cards to her little...
View ArticleIn the Heart of the Sea
“The Essex disaster is not a tale of adventure,” writes Nathaniel Philbrick in his solemn retelling of the 1820 shipwreck that led to unspeakable horrors on the high seas. “It is a tragedy that happens...
View ArticleYouth
If there is one word to characterize the aesthetic of Paolo Sorrentino, that word is “more.” The Italian director—a regular fixture at the Cannes film festival, whose last film The Great Beauty won him...
View ArticleDon Verdean
Those of us who enjoy Napoleon Dynamite can still recognize it as a fluke. Even without the supporting evidence of Nacho Libre and Gentlemen Broncos—two rather dismal efforts unmistakably made by the...
View ArticleClose Range
There’s something to be said for the power of a formulaic action thriller. The motion picture as fatty snack food has its place in any healthy cinematic diet, but it’s gotta come in bite size, easy to...
View ArticleDreams Rewired
The film opens on people—hundreds of people. They’re crowded together in an unidentified public place, and they aren’t like us. They’re in grainy, black-and-white film and they clearly belong to...
View ArticleSon of Saul
Hungarian director László Nemes makes his directorial debut with the WWII drama Son of Saul. The title’s Saul (Géza Röhrig), a Sonderkommando—which were Jewish concentration camp prisoners forced to...
View ArticleStar Wars: Episode VII- The Force Awakens
The kids that grew up watching Star Wars and Rocky are finally running the show and they are ready to reclaim their childhood from the greedy maw of Hollywood. Last month, Ryan Coogler injected life...
View ArticleThe Hateful Eight
No matter how you feel about Quentin Tarantino’s films, they are cinematic happenings that promote discussion. The director has often featured criminals and morally questionable scoundrels, daring us...
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