Archenemy
Archenemy is a new superhero movie. Or is it? Adam Egypt Mortimer‘s latest feature is a stylish hybrid of a scuzzy crime thriller and superheroics, with a gruff leathery Joe Manganiello as the face of...
View ArticleKoko-Di Koko-da
What if you combined elements of The Conjuring with Groundhog Day and even a dash of Antichrist? It sounds like a blend tailor-made for dark entertainment. And with Koko-Di Koko-da, you couldn’t say...
View ArticleParallel
One can imagine that the paradox of time travel is probably the same as the paradox of alternate universes: attempting to change things is a very risky business. A group of reckless entrepreneurs...
View ArticleSkylines
I doubt I’d be alone in describing the experience of discovering 2017’s Beyond Skyline. Skyline? That 2010 sci-fi movie with brain removals and blue-light vacuums, a movie so forgettably abysmal that...
View ArticleAnother Round
What would Old School look like if made by Danish director Thomas Vinterberg? Well, it would include a lot of drinking, a good deal of vomiting, maybe even a dance number or two. But unlike a non-stop...
View ArticleNews of the World
Paul Greengrass traffics in massacre porn. Whether it’s the ill-fated flight of United 93, an Irish uprising in Bloody Sunday or a white supremacist attack in Norway that left 77 dead in 22 July, you...
View ArticlePieces of a Woman
There’s an elephant in the room. Let’s get rid of it. Shia LaBeouf, recently accused by ex-girlfriend FKA twigs of emotional, physical and sexual abuse alongside animal cruelty, stars in Pieces of a...
View ArticleOeuvre: David Cronenberg: The Fly
The term “body horror” has clung to David Cronenberg and his oeuvre like a terrible case of herpes that will never go away. Though many of the Canadian director’s movies have nothing to do with...
View ArticleAverage Joe
There is a solid idea buried somewhere beneath the rubble of obvious budgetary limitations and pedestrian craft in Average Joe, a shockingly low-rent action-comedy that takes aim at superhero origin...
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Revisit: Amores Perros
Cofi, the Rottweiler protagonist of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Amores Perros, finds himself at the wrong end of a gun barrel not once or twice, but three distinct times. While this situation...
View ArticleRedemption Day
The screenplay for Redemption Day seems like an extended act of narrative regression in three parts (four, if you count the baffling final scene). This makes sense when one takes into account the...
View ArticleThe Reason I Jump
Cinema is a window into worlds we might otherwise never see. Whether depicting the quotidian or the extraordinary, the mundane or the fantastical, it offers the spectator an opportunity to experience...
View ArticleCriminally Underrated: Message in a Bottle
For fans of the modern romantic drama film, The Notebook undoubtedly stands as either a nostalgic tearjerker or a clichéd and shudder-inducing box office hit from a bygone era of film. Indeed, the...
View ArticleAmerican Skin
Once the initial wave of Sundance hype around Nate Parker’s Birth of a Nation cooled, audiences were left with the clear impression that the film, an account of slave rebellion leader Nat Turner, used...
View ArticleThe Marksman
An Arizona rancher living near the Mexico border gets on the wrong side of a drug cartel in Robert Lorenz’s road movie thriller The Marksman. It’s a timely and ultimately predictable story, but it gets...
View ArticleOeuvre: David Cronenberg: Dead Ringers
After the box office success of The Fly in 1986, David Cronenberg’s options were wide open to command the kind of production budget that had eluded him up to that point in his career. The obvious move...
View ArticleMLK/FBI
Martin Luther King Jr. occupied a position at the center of American politics and culture for only 15-odd years as a living, breathing, active force. There’s scarcely another figure in history who...
View ArticleFilm About a Father Who
A daughter explores her feelings about, the biographical landmarks and the explosion of family begotten by her father in Film About a Father Who, a free-flowing documentary whose title might lack the...
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Revisit: The Great Escape
There is something undeniably quaint about John Sturges’ sprawling 1963 World War II epic, The Great Escape. It exists in this weird liminal cinematic plane, somewhere between the bloated, nearly...
View ArticleDon’t Tell a Soul
A single character separates Don’t Tell a Soul from the faintly intriguing but predictable thriller it could be and the borderline-irresponsible one that it is. We’ll get there in a moment, but in the...
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