Girl
Girl isn’t exactly a title that sets expectations. Coming-of-age in Appalachia? Winter’s Bone-esque rural drama? A meditation on midwestern hardships? No, director/writer Chad Faust has simpler goals...
View ArticleBuddy Games
The subject of Buddy Games is purportedly the undying union of lifelong friendship, but one would be forgiven for thinking it was the lasting damage of psychological torment and physical violence. To...
View ArticleKoshien: Japan’s Field of Dreams
One thing that most human societies share is spectacular public rituals that are intrinsic to local identity but are unknown to the rest of the world: county fairs, sports competitions, pageants,...
View ArticleCollective
Two elements central to the story of director Alexander Nanau’s Collective, the Romanian documentary that’s been on a gradual global breakthrough since its debut at the Venice Film Festival in...
View ArticleMy Psychedelic Love Story
Joanna Harcourt-Smith took up with Timothy Leary at the height of the former Harvard professor’s counterculture outlaw days. Her globetrotting, whirlwind romance with the High Priest of LSD is a wild...
View ArticleRediscover: Shadowlands
The exceptionally thoughtful Shadowlands is not just a romantic drama but a story of abiding love. That is what resonates most deeply in screenwriter William Nicholson’s adaptation of his own 1989 play...
View ArticleHearts and Bones
Not very long ago, when Hollywood still produced midbudget studio fare, there would be two or three films a year that could best be described as middlebrow adult dramas with a milquetoast liberal...
View ArticleHillbilly Elegy
Rarely has a film been released with such bizarre impertinency to its political climate as Hillbilly Elegy. Depicting the period between 1997 and 2011, director Ron Howard has adapted a 2016 book that...
View Article76 Days
“News,” so the saying goes, “is the first rough draft of history.” 76 Days may not exactly be news — even upon premiering at TIFF in September, it was five months after its own facts — but it neatly...
View ArticleOeuvre: David Cronenberg: Videodrome
After a more mainstream approach than his earlier exploitation work with Scanners, David Cronenberg returned to the science fiction well with 1983’s Videodrome, a film that, to this day, feels like the...
View ArticleBlack Bear
Writer-director Lawrence Michael Levine appears to be making a point with Black Bear, but the problem is that the point is nearly impossible to determine. This is a movie that begins as one thing,...
View ArticleWander
Tim Doiron’s screenplay for Wander is a huge mess. The problems begin and, as it turns out, end with the protagonist, who is a paranoid conspiracy theorist tasked with solving the gruesome murder of a...
View ArticleRevisit: W
Early on in Oliver Stone’s curious 2008 biopic W., a young George Bush, Jr. (played at all ages by Josh Brolin) insists to a cheering crowd of Yale fraternity brothers that he has no interest in...
View ArticleBillie
There are two potentially fascinating documentary portraits in director James Erskine’s Billie. There is of course the tragic tale of legendary jazz singer Billie Holiday, who died in 1959 of cirrhosis...
View ArticleCrock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan
Shane MacGowan, frontman for Irish punk group the Pogues, likes to drink. The tales of his alcohol consumption are legendary, leading his bandmates to kick him out of the group in 1991 for missing...
View ArticleHoly Hell! In the Mood for Love Turns 20
As Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love turns two decades old, it’s difficult to put into words the significance this particular work has had on not only cinematic history, but on the lives, hearts and...
View ArticleI’m Your Woman
There’s a mystery wrapped up in the title of I’m Your Woman, director Julia Hart’s slow-burning crime thriller: Whose woman are we talking about? The film opens and closes on images of Jean (Rachel...
View ArticleOeuvre: David Cronenberg: The Dead Zone
In the same year that David Cronenberg released what our own Dominic Griffin has described as “the platonic ideal of the body horror subgenre,” the Canadian director also offered up perhaps his least...
View ArticleTo the Ends of the Earth
Writer-director Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s To the Ends of the Earth follows Yoko (Atsuko Maeda), the host of a variety series and something of a lab rat for its producers, as she travels to Uzbekistan to...
View ArticleGunda
Gunda is a patient, unobtrusive, objective documentary, but it’s not dispassionate. Were an alien to descend from the skies, perch themselves before a screen and spend but a brief time digesting its...
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