Boon
Boon is the sort of film that so ambiguously straddles the line between po-faced seriousness and self-parody that it’s impossible to tell whether its stale genre tropes are knowingly employed as jokes....
View ArticleThe Bubble
Decades from now, how will film historians and cinephiles look back upon pandemic-era cinema, specifically those films centered around COVID-19 itself? There have been some true cinematic standouts set...
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Revisit: Mirror
Andrei Tarkovsky once said, “In all my films, it seemed important to me to remind the audience to the fact that they are not alone, lost in an empty universe, but that they are connected by innumerable...
View ArticleHoly Hell! Minority Report Turns 20
2002 was a pretty dynamite year, if you were Steven Spielberg. It was the year that saw him direct Catch Me if You Can, a ludicrously fun, intrigue-packed crime film based on the autobiography of...
View ArticleApollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood
When Richard Linklater set out to make Dazed and Confused (1993), the director claimed his look at high school in the ‘70s was meant to be anti-nostalgic. But has there been a director as obsessed with...
View ArticleOeuvre: Claire Denis: S’en fout la mort
Dah, the hero of Claire Denis’ S’en fout la mort, speaks in the kind of terse shorthand you might expect from film noir. He talks about his grand plans, and how he can see every angle in his scheme. It...
View ArticleAmbulance
Some plots will always be reliable in Hollywood. No studio ever went bankrupt on a movie about an innocent person wrongly accused, two people who resist their love for each other, or the lone voice of...
View ArticleAll the Old Knives
There are no car chases in All the Old Knives, no gun battles and no exploding gadgetry. You won’t find any skydiving stunts, doomsday devices or sneering supervillains. Instead, there are intense...
View ArticleRediscover: Arrebato
The fevered, anxious Arrebato (Rapture), the 1979 feature by Basque-born director Iván Zulueta, is steeped in the hedonism and horror of addiction. The director and his collaborators nurse a heroin...
View ArticleCow
Andrea Arnold’s immersive documentary Cow seeks to bridge the yawning disconnect between modern humans and the source of our food. Yet the British filmmaker, known for such features as American Honey...
View ArticlePoppy Field
The new Romanian drama Poppy Field has a pervasive sense of anger, and buries it. Most of the anger belongs to the tortured protagonist, a gay man who hides parts of his identity to everyone in his...
View ArticleCriminally Underrated: Body Parts
Today, the idea of body horror likely brings to mind a certain kind of terror and imagery: the warped mutated flesh of David Cronenberg’s films, The Thing’s grotesque aberrations of the human form, the...
View ArticleParis, 13th District
A new Jacques Audiard film is always an intriguing proposition, if not a reliable one. Having garnered critical acclaim in the early-to-mid-2000s for French thrillers like Read My Lips and The Beat...
View ArticleWe’re All Going to the World’s Fair
Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair It begins with the Internet as we know it today, a place where people work seemingly from birth to build a brand. Casey (Anna Cobb), a girl who...
View ArticleLove In Kilnerry
Love in Kilnerry has been on quite a journey to make its debut on the big screen. After its start as an off-Broadway play, writer, director and star Daniel Keith has been workshopping and screening his...
View ArticleDual
We are always fighting with different versions of ourselves. Sometimes that tension can be minor, like when we look in the mirror and resent our gray hair, or a nurse a nasty hangover that would never...
View ArticleThe Cellar
Almost stubbornly, it seems, writer/director Brendan Muldowney builds a dull mystery and pays it off with everything one might expect from its set-up in The Cellar. This is another in a long line of...
View ArticleThe Tale of King Crab
There may be no more American tale than that of the derelict drunk chased out of his hometown after committing a notorious crime only to wash up some place entirely new, often with a more sober frame...
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Rediscover: Deep Cover
Deep Cover may have been lost on its audience in 1992. Though Black filmmaking was riding an unprecedented wave of popularity following the critical and commercial success of Spike Lee’s Do the Right...
View ArticleTo Olivia
Anyone with a passing knowledge of the life of Roald Dahl might still not be fully aware of the tragic circumstances that led to his writing Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, that essential work of...
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