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Revisit: Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
Jim Jarmusch has long been interested in communication. Not exactly in how we communicate but the space that exists when people from different backgrounds interface. In his early work, the director...
View ArticleSettlers
A good, old-fashioned Western tends to be about a lot more than just a cowboy’s adventures on the wild frontier. The best of the genre speaks to elemental qualities that resonate on the same level as...
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From the Vaults of Streaming Hell: Heidi 4 Paws
At the unlikely intersection of beloved children’s literature and the David Lynch family lies the all-star talking dog movie Heidi 4 Paws. True to its shaggy ensemble cast, writer-director Holly...
View ArticleKandisha
Even among contemporaries of the New French Extremity wave, Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo‘s 2007 debut Inside was a gore-drenched electric shock. Painting the walls with blood, its savage blend...
View ArticleOeuvre: Fellini: Orchestra Rehearsal
Throughout his long career as a director, Federico Fellini never made what might be defined as a small movie, his tastes too inclined toward the epic and grandiose to broach anything resembling...
View ArticleThe Green Knight
The first weapon Sir Gawain uses in The Green Knight, the new fantasy film written and directed by David Lowery, is Excalibur. King Arthur’s legendary sword glows and hums with menace, and Gawain...
View ArticleEnemies of the State
It is nearly impossible to follow the details of Enemies of the State, a documentary about an apparent case of espionage at the heart of the American homeland. That isn’t a criticism, by the way, but...
View ArticleNine Days
The magical meets the methodical in Edson Oda’s spellbinding Nine Days. Tasked with an extraordinary duty that carries profound existential implications, the appropriately named Will (Winston Duke)...
View ArticleThe Evening Hour
The opioid crisis afflicting rural communities across the US has been a major topic within current affairs discourse for several years now, spanning (at least) three administrations, so it is...
View ArticleTailgate
There is a cruel logic to writer/director Lodewijk Crijns’s screenplay for Tailgate, which carries a simple premise: A family man lets his road rage get the best of him in a highway encounter with...
View ArticleRevisit: The Street Fighter
Sonny Chiba may not be as much an international household name as Bruce Lee, but it’s difficult to imagine another titan of the martial arts genre as equally defined by physical presence and powerhouse...
View ArticleThe Exchange
The Exchange is the third full-length feature film by director Dan Mazer, whose previous efforts Dirty Grandpa and I Give It a Year were of varying to poor success (although the latter had an...
View ArticleCriminally Underrated: White House Down
Roger Ebert once coined a moniker for a specific type of action picture, called the Bruised Forearm Movie, a film that kept building upon its own premise and spectacle until the forearm of one’s...
View ArticleVal
How will Val Kilmer be remembered? Will he be known as just another pretty face chewed up and spit out by Hollywood? Or will his performance as Jim Morrison in The Doors (1991) elevate him to the...
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Oeuvre: Fellini: And the Ship Sails On
Four decades into a legendary filmmaking career, and with his name indicating a genre unto itself, Fellini continued making films that amused him, challenged his cinematic chops and largely eschewed...
View ArticleAnnette
The first voice in Leos Carax’s Annette belongs to the director himself, who introduces the film with a comically pretentious bit of emceeing that demands the audience’s respectful silence for what is...
View ArticleThe Suicide Squad
One of the biggest problems with current superhero films is that there are no real stakes. When the “snap” happened in Infinity War, it was a certainty that everyone’s favorite heroes would return...
View ArticleInfinitum: Subject Unknown
Every inch of Infinitum: Subject Unknown is clearly a labor of love on the part of its makers. Filmed during our ongoing health crisis, with a remote post-production process, the end credits of...
View Article6:45
The central gimmick of Harold Ramis’1993 masterpiece Groundhog Day—a character caught in a time loop must resolve a conflict within his own character to break the cycle—has been recycled in countless...
View ArticleJohn and the Hole
For a film about an adolescent boy who holds his family captive in a pit, the bluntly titled John and the Hole could easily veer into psychological horror. At the very least, the conditions are ripe...
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