From the Vaults of Streaming Hell: The Killer Eye
For all its bargain-basement production values, the 1999 sci-fi horror The Killer Eye, directed by David DeCoteau under the pseudonym Richard Chasen, looks more expensive than the assembly line of...
View ArticleThe Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
Deep into the intermittently entertaining but largely self-conscious The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, Nicolas Cage, playing himself, turns down a lucrative party gig suggested by his agent...
View ArticleThe Northman
Ads and trailers for The Northman suggest a ferocious Viking epic. There are scenes of intense action, some staged against dramatic backdrops, that will please those who find most mainstream action...
View Article9 Bullets
Simply put, 9 Bullets is a strange movie. It features an inconsistent protagonist, some dead-end plot mechanics, and an apparent lack of understanding by writer/director Gigi Gaston of how to balance...
View ArticleThe Duke
The final fiction feature made by director Roger Michell (Notting Hill) before he died in 2021, The Duke, with its commanding lead performance from veteran Jim Broadbent, has elements of an autumnal...
View ArticleRediscover: Saint Jack
It can seem easy to construct an arc around a director’s filmography, as if this slab of completed work was itself explainable or understandable in narrative terms, a larger outgrowth of the movies...
View ArticlePetite Maman
Céline Sciamma wrote Petite Maman as a challenge to both herself and audiences, to make a movie about relationships not driven by conflict. Even so, it opens in a quiet storm of emotions as...
View ArticleHit the Road
In writer/director Panah Panahi’s film, Hit the Road, a small family packs itself into a minivan to travel from a small town in Iran to the Turkish border, in order to fulfill the dreams of one of its...
View ArticleHoly Hell! Dog Soldiers Turns 20
Alas, the poor werewolf. Forever enshrined in the annals of horror thanks to Lon Chaney’s legendary Universal Monster, yet among those iconic terrors, it’s arguably been the most underserved in recent...
View ArticleMarvelous and the Black Hole
At 13 years old, life can feel like an all-encompassing black hole. That’s teen angst; growing humans feel isolated in their struggles, with parents who fail to understand them and dismiss their...
View ArticleOeuvre: Claire Denis: I Can’t Sleep
By the time she released her third film, I Can’t Sleep (aka J’as pas sommeil (1994)), Claire Denis had already begun to explore and inhabit her mature style, with all its accompanying thematic...
View ArticleMemory
For an aging demographic, there’s something viscerally satisfying about watching Liam Neeson beat the crap out of another bad guy. As our bodies grow weaker, it can be fun to watch someone giving in to...
View ArticleOeuvre: Claire Denis: Nénette et Boni
The central themes of most of Claire Denis’ cinema come readily to mind: colonialism, racism, sexuality and gender. These latter two are present in all her films. It may seem a lazy comparison, given...
View ArticleUnplugging
It is a testament almost exclusively to the actors that Unplugging is not more aggravating than it has turned out to be. The plot is a familiar one, in which a married couple decides to detox from...
View ArticleHatching
Motherhood is a complex thing. You spend months carrying and growing a human being inside your body. The baby is very much a part of you, until all of a sudden, it’s not. Once born, a baby becomes its...
View ArticleAnaïs in Love
Anaïs is the sort of young woman who is always in motion. Whether she is talking to her lovers or her employers, she has a breezy way of talking past them, getting them to accept or agree her ideas...
View ArticleFirebird
As a beautifully filmed love story set against a backdrop of Cold War military repression, Firebird, directed by Peeter Rebane, seems to want to edge into erotic thriller territory, but there isn’t...
View ArticleRevisit: National Treasure: Book of Secrets
Nicolas Cage is having something of a moment. His newest film, the acclaimed The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, is something of a meta-commentary on the actor’s gonzo career of acting in genuine...
View ArticleHello, Bookstore
Some documentaries take deep dives into the past, telling old stories to new audiences. They serve as single, definitive statements that allow filmmakers to present their argument at a distance. Others...
View ArticleBlack Box
The mystery at the center of Black Box is simple; the pieces of that mystery, far from it. What happened to European Flight 24, an Atrian 800 that crashed, killing all 300 souls aboard? This story is...
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