Cruella
“Cruella de Vil… Cruella de Vil…” The old song claims, “If she doesn’t scare you, no evil thing will,” but what about the crushing capitalist and opportunistic cash grabs of major studios running...
View ArticleA Quiet Place Part II
A big part of the appeal of A Quiet Place Part II, like its predecessor, lies in the sensory shock that happens when the sound cuts out and the characters go mum to escape the notice of the unseen...
View ArticleNew Order
New Order is a dystopian drama that has more interest in suffering than any coherent point. It is relentlessly bleak and cynical, a film that depicts mass murder and ritualized execution with no real...
View ArticleShepherd: The Story of a Jewish Dog
Adapted from a best-selling Israeli novel, Shepherd: The Story of a Jewish Dog is a historical melodrama that hits its emotional marks with the subtlety of a pit bull. The film raises questions about...
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Rediscover: Brute Force
Jules Dassin created some of cinema’s most brutal moments in his oeuvre, scenes of shocking violence that still pack a punch more than 70 years after his films debuted. Brute Force, released in 1947...
View ArticleAhead of the Curve
Documentaries have, among laypeople, something of an unfortunate reputation. Compared to fiction films, they’re perceived as being dry, educational, inaccessible. It’s a reputation accrued over years...
View ArticleAmerican Traitor: The Trial of Axis Sally
One would think that the story of Mildred Gillars would be pretty straightforward, even from a legal perspective. The time in which we live now, of course, is far removed from the period in which the...
View ArticleHoly Hell! Pulse turns 20
Japanese horror is a wide, multifaceted ocean, from Nobuhiko Obayashi’s deranged House to well-known classics like Ringu and Audition to scuzzy V-cinema gorefests. Kiyoshi Kurosawa has contributed more...
View ArticleWelcome Matt
It’s hard not to sympathize with Matt (Tahj Mowry), the protagonist of writer/director Leon Pierce Jr.’s film, in his current situation. A filmmaker who met some success with a big-budget studio...
View ArticleMoby Doc
If you are reading this, you probably first heard Moby’s music at the end of Michael Mann’s Heat. It is an incredible scene: De Niro’s character gets shot by Pacino’s, and in a small moment of human...
View ArticleSpirit Untamed
Spirit Untamed acts as a reimagining of two other stories following the adventures of Spirit, a Kiger mustang who (thankfully) does not speak anthropomorphically. The first is 2002’s nobly...
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Oeuvre: Fellini: The Short Films
While not entirely extinct, the omnibus film stands today as a largely moribund tradition, a relic of the peak mid-century era of the international co-production. This is no great loss. While often...
View ArticleSwimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue
Over the last decade, Jia Zhangke, the Chinese director whose films have charted his homeland’s rapid and often rough social change from imperialism to communism to a hybrid form of consumer...
View ArticleThe Carnivores
There is a new cottage industry of low-budget horror movies about awkward people and their secret insatiable appetites. The French horror film Raw is about a young woman who slowly discovers she is a...
View ArticleUndine
To date, Christian Petzold has proven to be a master of the modern European anti-thriller, crafting movies that generate remarkable tension despite their general lack of the sorts of aesthetic tics...
View ArticleDeath in Texas
Death in Texas, the third feature film from director and screenwriter Scott Windhauser, carries the same exaggerated drama and action thriller ambitions of his prior work. Ronnie Gene Blevins plays...
View ArticleAll Light, Everywhere
“You gotta understand – your perspective is different from mine.” Those words, spoken by a Baltimore resident reluctant to allow a drone surveillance company to operate in his neighborhood, seem to be...
View ArticleRevisit: Monsieur Hire
At face value, the 1989 crime drama Monsieur Hire is about a creepy and predatorial voyeur and the young woman he targets. Yet the nuances of writer-director Patrice Leconte’s 1989 film travel far...
View ArticleDementia Part II
Released in 2015, Dementia was director Mike Testin’s twisty horror debut: a dark psychological slow-burn of paranoia and fractured memories, following an elderly veteran who’s tormented by his...
View ArticleThe Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It
The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It is a prison. For its lead actors, Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson, it feels like the cells confining them are contractual, as you can witness the defeated...
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