Revisit: The Commitments
The English director Alan Parker, who passed away last summer at age 76 after a long illness, left behind an impressively diverse array of film projects. His early work includes Bugsy Malone, a...
View ArticleWhite as Snow
It’s hard to know how to react to White as Snow, which presents itself on one level as an earnest character study of a young woman discovering her capacity for desire, and on another level as a deeply...
View ArticleConfetti
In her latest film, Confetti, writer-director Ann Hu dramatizes her own difficulties as a bright girl who was born with a learning disorder. Strong performances and the clearly personal connection...
View ArticleCriminally Underrated: Lifeforce
The sun-scorched macabre delirium of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The carny-slasher nightmare of The Funhouse. The festering scumbag sleaze of Eaten Alive and the deranged gallows humor of The Texas...
View ArticleCandyman
Released in 1992, the original Candyman was marketed as a slasher film of the popcorn variety but turned out to be a different kind of uniquely American horror story. The title stalker, who like Bloody...
View ArticleRushed
Rushed revolves around Barbara O’Brien (Siobhan Fallon Hogan), a deeply devout Irish Catholic mother whose son Jimmy (Jay Jay Warren) is the victim of a brutal bout of fraternity hazing gone wrong....
View ArticleNo Man of God
No Man of God is a matter-of-fact, direct response to the lurid resurgence of the true crime genre. In narrative and documentary true crime films, there can be a sense of exploitation in the countless...
View ArticleEllie and Abbie (and Ellie’s Dead Aunt)
Ellie and Abbie (and Ellie’s Dead Aunt) is the first full-length feature from writer/director Monica Zanetti, based on her own stage play. The film is both small-scale and full-hearted, the everyday...
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Revisit: The Parallax View
In a recent article for Rolling Stone, Tim Dickinson explored how anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists have found one another to create the perfect storm for Covid-19 to lay waste to the United...
View ArticleLily Topples the World
If the job of a documentary is to enlighten the audience about a topic previously unknown to them, then Lily Topples the World easily fits the bill. One may not be (or, at least, this writer wasn’t)...
View ArticleAmerican Sausage Standoff
Satire requires a deft touch, and clumsy attempts often turn out undercooked at best, toxic at worst. American Sausage Standoff falls into that latter category, as its wildly mean-spirited attempt to...
View ArticleFrom the Vaults of Streaming Hell: Society
There’s a classic film-watching tradition — largely lost with the advent of streaming services — that involves randomly flicking through the wasteland of late-night television, in the oft-futile hope...
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Oeuvre: Fellini: Intervista
Nearing the end of a legendary career steering Italian neorealism towards something much more idiosyncratic and personal, Fellini made a movie that feels mostly for and about himself and his circle of...
View ArticleMogul Mowgli
You can imagine the scriptwriting sessions for Mogul Mowgli. Co-writers Riz Ahmed and Bassam Tariq are excitedly going through one idea after another, realizing their film needs as many references to...
View ArticleYakuza Princess
Stylishly photographed but indifferently scripted, the would-be action movie Yakuza Princess fails to live up to its eye-catching name. Director Vicente Amorim manages the visual end of cinema just...
View ArticleWe Need to Do Something
Aside from a handful of flashbacks, the inhabitants of We Need to Do Something never leave the purple tiled walls of its single location. The horror film observes a family of four sheltering in their...
View ArticleRevisit: The World’s End
We can never truly go back home. Even if the places that shaped us haven’t changed all that much, we have changed as people, and there’s simply no way to catch the same lightning in a bottle. In 2013,...
View ArticleThe Gateway
One thing is for certain: Screenwriters Alex Felix Bendaña, Michele Civetta (who also directed), and Andrew Levitas have devised a worthy protagonist in The Gateway. Parker, the man in question, has...
View ArticleThe Big Scary ‘S’ Word
There is no time like the present to make an impassioned plea to erase the misperceptions and forgive the misunderstandings surrounding socialism, an apparently nebulous but really quite...
View ArticleHoly Hell! Donnie Darko Turns 20
Twenty years ago next month, a surreal, humorous, unsettling, moving coming-of-age film about wrinkles in the space-time continuum hit theaters in the US. A plane crash featured heavily in the...
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