Oeuvre: Claire Denis: Let the Sunshine In
At the most fundamental level, Claire Denis’ Let the Sunshine In is just a romantic comedy. It operates with many of the tropes of the genre, focuses on a single dynamic female lead and follows a...
View ArticleCha Cha Real Smooth
Lacking direction in life, recent college grad Andrew (Cooper Raiff) is back living at home with his mother (Leslie Mann), stepfather (Brad Garrett) and stepbrother David (Evan Assante). His girlfriend...
View ArticleAbandoned
Bad horror can be fun because it is often silly, or transcends good taste. More than any other genre, it has the potential to find itself in camp territory (in the classic Sontag definition of the...
View ArticleOfficial Competition
Films lampooning the moviemaking process rarely get much darker than The Player, Robert Altman’s 1992 pitch-black skewer that struck right at the heart of Hollywood. In a town where the people who make...
View ArticleRevisit: Paterson
Paterson is a subdued, quiet bus driver who observes the beauty, meaning and humor in the daily interactions of his customers, as well as the beats of his daily routine; the sun rising along the...
View ArticleStay Prayed Up
As much gentle evangelism as music documentary, Stay Prayed Up, directed by D.L. Anderson and Matthew Durning, follows Raleigh, North Carolina gospel singer Lena Mae Perry as she gets ready to make her...
View ArticleSpiderhead
Sci-fi thriller Spiderhead unintentionally reveals the limits of Netflix as a streaming service. The star is Chris Hemsworth, who is about to appear in Thor: Love and Thunder, which will probably be...
View ArticleFrom the Vaults of Streaming Hell: Celia
Ideally, this unique movie should be seen without knowing anything at all about it in advance; sorry about that. But it’s worth writing a little about it anyway, because it seems to be so...
View ArticleThe Good Neighbor
The 2022 version of The Good Neighbor is a remake of the 2011 German film of the same English title (the German title is Unter Nachbarn) both written and directed by Stephan Rick. The 2011 German film,...
View ArticleApples
The characters in Apples exist in a state somewhere between awareness and stasis. This is understandable, given that the world of co-writer/director Christos Nikou’s film has been stricken with a...
View ArticleOeuvre: Claire Denis: High Life
After decades of making inscrutable films, Claire Denis’ High Life might be her most daring yet. Her English-language debut, starring a former teen icon, has a sci-fi premise that could have attracted...
View ArticleElvis
Baz Luhrmann must have some natural affection for Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis Presley’s longtime manager. Like Parker, Luhrmann is an outsider who knows a good show when he sees it, and he uses whatever...
View ArticleFlux Gourmet
In the decade since he broke out with 2012’s Berberian Sound Studio, Peter Strickland has steadily grown beyond his initial impression as a gifted pastichist of classic ’70s giallo into one of...
View ArticlePress Play
Here is a movie that works almost entirely because of its commitment to a genuinely intriguing premise. Director Greg Björkman, who co-wrote the script with James Bachelor, doesn’t dig deeply into the...
View ArticleRubikon
In the not-too-distant future depicted in Rubikon, man-made climate change has turned Earth into a barren wasteland. Only the very rich have been granted access to massive architectural bubbles,...
View ArticleFire of Love
At one point in Sara Dosa’s Fire of Love, researcher Maurice Krafft says “Both Katia and I got into volcanology because we were disappointed with humanity,” and that they are on the hunt for something...
View ArticleThe Forgiven
“What are you doing?” “Stepping on diamonds. It’s taboo. I hope the genies get pissed off.” It’s not exactly Harold Pinter, but that exchange between a wealthy London couple (Jessica Chastain and Ralph...
View ArticleThe Princess
With five months left in the year, it’s hard to imagine 2022 offering more of an action-movie-for-action-fans than this. If one fondly remembers Albert Pyun-Gary Daniels collaborations as forgotten...
View ArticleThor: Love and Thunder
There’s an existential question hanging over Marvel movies these days: Can a director with a unique personal vision bring a fresh sensibility to the decades-spanning juggernaut of corporate product...
View ArticleBoth Sides of the Blade
At first blush, Both Sides of the Blade is the biggest outlier in Claire Denis’s filmography since Let the Sunshine In. Though its opening images of two lovers, Sara (Juliette Binoche) and Jean...
View Article