No Time to Die
It’s no secret No Time to Die marks the final installment of Daniel Craig’s run as James Bond, which began 15 years ago. He’s been looking to hang up the tux and brush aside a shaken martini for some...
View ArticleA Living Dog
One must applaud writer/director Daniel Raboldt’s choices with regards to conciseness in his screenplay for A Living Dog. This is a post-apocalyptic survivalist drama without a single word of spoken or...
View ArticleGolden Voices
Sometimes it takes a complete break with one’s past in order to bring about a new way of living. Sudden dramatic changes in habitual circumstance tend to send one careening off into heretofore...
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Revisit: Secrets & Lies
Mike Leigh has been long-fascinated with the rhythms inherent in a family. We carve out our identities, or often have them carved out for us by our loved ones. These selves that sometimes don’t reflect...
View ArticleSilent Hours
The journey to the screen for director Mark Greenstreet’s mystery thriller Silent Hours involved several altered pedigrees over the course of half a decade. It was initially cut as a feature film in...
View ArticleThe Gig is Up
The point that director Shannon Walsh seems to be making with her documentary The Gig is Up is simple but potent: In a capitalistic economy where the top level of the upper class hoards the wealth, the...
View ArticleFrom the Vaults of Streaming Hell: The Blue Bird
Your faithful Streaming Hell columnist regularly watches, with pleasure, movies that would send the typical moviegoer running away as if on fire. From talking animal movies to no-budget work from the...
View ArticleDetention
Director John Hsu’s debut feature Detention features strong lead performances and dazzling visuals. But the video game source material, itself inspired by true events that took place during a period of...
View ArticleOeuvre: Melville: Bob le flambeur
Though it was only his fourth film, Bob le Flambeur—the rarely used English-language title is usually Bob the Gambler—features a structure and protagonist that are pure Jean-Pierre Melville. The viewer...
View ArticleThe Last Duel
If someone demands a duel, at minimum they are incredibly stubborn and brittle. The aggrieved party feels the normal channels of justice are inadequate, so they demand a vulgar public display where...
View ArticleMass
True to the title of Gus Van Sant’s 2003 film, Elephant, school shootings still remain a proverbial pachyderm in the room for Americans. Just like our politicians who hem and haw whenever one of these...
View ArticleNeedle in a Timestack
The conflict at the heart of Needle in a Timestack is the stuff of pure, shameless melodrama (and the title is shameless in other ways, too). This is not a problem on its own, but it would be nice if...
View ArticleRediscover: An Elephant Sitting Still
This is the only film Chinese filmmaker Hu Bo made before he ended his own life shortly after wrapping production. The writer-director-editor’s suicide hangs uncomfortably over the entire film,...
View ArticleWheel of Fortune and Fantasy
What drives us towards the people we fall in love with? Is our attraction to others something that we allow to happen gradually over time? Or can it be said that our romantic desire for one another is...
View ArticleHard Luck Love Song
Based on folk singer Todd Snider’s 2006 song “Just Like Old Times,” Hard Luck Love Song seems like the embodiment of an old country tune padded to feature length. To its credit, much of these 104...
View ArticleCriminally Underrated: The Outfit
Parker may not be a name that immediately grabs the attention of modern crime thriller fans. Yet the literary antihero of author Donald E. Westlake – or rather his pseudonym Richard Stark – has a...
View ArticleIntroducing, Selma Blair
A documentary of uncommon frankness and honesty, Introducing, Selma Blair takes us inside the eponymous actor’s health battles, following a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis in August 2018, and through...
View ArticleOeuvre: Melville: Two Men in Manhattan
There’s no shortage of movies that utilize New York City as a setting; in fact, enough productions have lazily selected Gotham (and it’s cross-coastal sibling, Los Angeles), as their location that it...
View ArticleThe Electrical Life of Louis Wain
A respectable screen biography, The Electrical Life of Louis Wain also smothers its good intentions with a lot of misplaced pomp and frills. Everything about co-writer/director Will Sharpe’s film...
View ArticleThe French Dispatch
The French Dispatch opens with a tray of cocktails, prepared in front of a building and then delivered to a room filled with journalists. What sounds like a perfectly bland exercise belies the complex...
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