Holy Hell! What Time Is It There? Turns 20
Is it possible for a film to be 100% detour but still end up at its destination on time? Regardless of its forays into clock changing, coffee vomiting and piss bagging, Taiwanese auteur Tsai...
View ArticleMalcolm & Marie
“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” So goes the famous quote by Maya Angelou. But what if someone has nothing to show? What if they can only tell you who they are,...
View ArticleLand
At its best, Robin Wright’s Land is a chilling update on a recent trend of films and books about the efforts to find oneself by giving up the comforts of modernity to return to nature. It begins with...
View ArticleOeuvre: David Cronenberg: eXistenZ
Within the latter half of David Cronenberg’s filmography, 1999’s eXistenZ marks the last time he would release a picture that remains so distinctly “Cronenbergian,” before evolving into a more...
View ArticleRediscover: Agatha and the Limitless Readings
Marguerite Duras broke new aesthetic ground in whatever medium she took on. In her novels, she deconstructed the conventions of literary form and style, and later expanded into playwriting and...
View ArticleJudas and the Black Messiah
A great performance in a middling film can typically have one of two effects. First and preferable is an elevation of the film, supplying it with a purpose it otherwise lacks. Second and less...
View ArticleMinari
The American Dream, that Edenic endpoint for families who work hard and never give up, has long been depicted in art as something that only pertains to white folks. In cinema especially, the wholesome...
View ArticleCowboys
At the heart of Cowboys is the touching story of two parents coming to understand the identity of their son, but writer-director Anna Kerrigan’s screenplay ultimately reveals itself to be an act of...
View ArticleFear of Rain
One must give writer/director Castille Landon credit where it is due: she certainly begins Fear of Rain in a place of fitting disorientation. One minute, our heroine is being chased through a dark...
View ArticleCriminally Underrated: Spider-Man 3
Following a film with as much positive buzz as 2004’s Spider-Man 2 would be the envy of no one, but co-writer/director Sam Raimi was tasked with exactly that in Spider-Man 3, the unintentional finale...
View ArticleThe Mauritanian
The most affecting sequence in Kevin Macdonald’s The Mauritanian occurs late ― too late, as it happens, to rescue this middling film from its humdrum telling of a story that’s anything but dull. But...
View ArticleOeuvre: David Cronenberg: Spider
David Cronenberg’s character studies are typically bleak affairs, often detailing the compaction of troubled characters as they fold down into themselves, suffering grievous bodily deformation in the...
View ArticleThe Violent Heart
The great pleasure of The Violent Heart lies in discovering what kind of movie it actually is. Written and directed by Kerem Sanga, the story reveals itself in layers, unfolding first as a family...
View ArticleNomadland
Sometimes it takes a director not born in the United States to accurately portray our country on film. For those insulated in the safety of the suburbs or hiding inside gated communities, the story...
View ArticleBody Brokers
Writer/director John Swab seems entirely incapable of determining, either for himself or for his audience, what point he is trying to make in Body Brokers, which takes curious pleasure in putting its...
View ArticleRevisit: Postcards from the Edge
Postcards from the Edge is an obvious gay cult classic few of us recognize as an obvious gay cult classic. How has it slipped through the cracks with a pedigree that remains so sterling, and content so...
View ArticleBlithe Spirit
In this latest adaptation of Noel Coward’s 1941 play, Blithe Spirit, director Edward Hall presents audiences with a triangle of elements necessary to do justice to beloved source material. On each end,...
View ArticleThe Swordsman
Between 1962 and 1979, Shintaro Katsu portrayed a character who would become an icon: Zatoichi, the wandering masseur-cum-blind warrior. The Japanese actor embodied the sightless samurai across 25...
View ArticleHoly Hell! A.I. Artificial Intelligence turns 20
Despite its title, A.I. Artificial Intelligence delves deeply into what it means to be human. Steven Spielberg’s 2001 film, populated as it is with a number of androids increasingly designed to mimic...
View ArticleCherry
This country’s disastrous misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan set the stage for what feels like the decline of American civilization, but such a grand statement doesn’t capture the human scale or...
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