Revisit: Signs
A common thread throughout the best works of M. Night Shyamalan is one’s grappling with their own mortality. This ideology is most recently seen in his newest thriller, Old, which takes the filmmaker’s...
View ArticleFrom the Vaults of Streaming Hell: Don’t Listen
Take two parts The Conjuring, add one part The Orphanage, season with a few dashes of Hereditary and glaze with The Shining and you’ve cooked up the 2020 Spanish horror flick Don’t Listen. Brimming...
View ArticleDays
Tsai Ming-Liang’s first feature since 2013’s career-capping Stray Dogs is full of the Taiwanese director’s signature long takes, surrounding an extended intimate encounter between a middle-aged man and...
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Oeuvre: Fellini: Ginger and Fred
Conspicuous in every aspect of his filmmaking, the biggest constant throughout Fellini’s oeuvre is a fascination with spectacle, the allure of which alternately enchants and repulses him. For all the...
View ArticleFree Guy
In the midst of the pandemic last summer, there were a handful of Zoom-oriented TV reunions that were meant to offer levity from lockdown tedium. One of these reunions was for “30 Rock,” a workplace...
View ArticleRespect
Whenever a new tent-pole blockbuster, usually of the Marvel or Star Wars variety, arrives to swallow popular culture, a certain segment of film critics and moviegoers respond with a collective sigh:...
View ArticleThe Lost Leonardo
Until 2005, no new works from the genius hand of Leonardo da Vinci had surfaced for a century. Then, an American art dealer buys a Renaissance image of Jesus painted on a wooden board for $10,000 at an...
View ArticleCODA
We meet the teenaged Ruby Rossi (Emilia Jones) working on her family’s fishing boat off the Massachusetts coast, blasting music on a radio and singing along as she helps her father, Frank (Troy...
View ArticleThe Meaning of Hitler
What drew people to Adolf Hitler? What still draws them to similarly horrible men? That is the central question that propels Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker’s new documentary, The Meaning of Hitler....
View ArticleEma
Everything about Ema seems specifically designed to keep us at a distance from its troubled and troubling protagonist. Ema (Mariana Di Girólamo) is stubborn, selfish and self-destructive in all the...
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Revisit: Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese
Is it surprising that Bob Dylan, he with the craggy face and constant dour expression, loves corny jokes? If you’ve seen him play in the last 30 years or so on his Never Ending Tour you may have heard...
View ArticleUsedom: A Clear View of the Sea
After the collapse of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, the Baltic Sea Island of Usedom, located in Pomerania and divided between Germany and Poland, suddenly became a melting pot of cultures and...
View ArticleRaging Fire
It would be easy to compare Benny Chan’s Raging Fire to Heat: an escalating collision between righteous cop and calculating criminal, a connection between them that transcends the law, a frantic...
View ArticleSearching for Mr. Rugoff
Putting its showbiz muscle behind challenging fare, New York film distributing company Cinema 5 broke some of the biggest arthouse movies of the ‘60s and ‘70s. But you’ve probably never heard of...
View ArticleHoly Hell! Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring Turns 20
That Peter Jackson cut his teeth on horror goes a long way towards explaining why Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring is as good as it is. Its budget and production values are insane, its...
View ArticleThe Night House
We’ve seen this image before: an empty boat bobbing on the ripples of a quiet lake. Hell, even The Last of Us II begins with this same ominous vision. But while a strong narrative thread runs through...
View ArticleDemonic
With a new Neill Blomkamp feature comes a sense of trepidation. His debut, District 9, still holds up as a lightning-in-a-bottle harmony of social commentary and gory sci-fi thrills. Yet his other...
View ArticleCryptozoo
Cryptozoo, the 2nd full-length animated feature from writer and director Dash Shaw, is “adult” animation; it features nudity, violence, grand themes and complex characters. It is a distinct film in its...
View ArticleWildland
Her mother has died, and her entire world has been upended. What follows the car crash that changes everything for Ida (Sandra Guldberg Kampp) in Wildland is, in terms of the story’s structure, typical...
View ArticleReminiscence
A leggy dame walks into a private dick’s office. She looks like trouble with a capital T, but her case is straight-forward enough–“Find my lost set of keys”–and he’s got lots of time and nowhere else...
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