Bundles
Shooting a film in Washington, DC is notoriously difficult. The permit system is confusing and expensive, so most films opt for B-roll, or film someplace else entirely. The Spielberg film The Post only...
View ArticleHoly Hell! 8 Mile Turns 20
Noticeably, Curtis Hanson’s 8 Mile does not have a traditional score. Instead, as we realize around the time our protagonist’s aspiring rap career comes into focus, the entirety of the music, made up...
View ArticleOeuvre: Scorsese: Boxcar Bertha
Martin Scorsese did not write Boxcar Bertha, his second feature after Who’s That Knocking at My Door. The film was one of those director-for-hire jobs – the film was produced by Roger Corman – and on...
View ArticleResurrection
Margaret exudes ruthless confidence. Impeccably dressed and living in a shiny condo, she is the sort of businesswoman who offers devastating advice to an underling because she knows how hard it can be...
View ArticleA Love Song
Max Walker-Silverman’s rustic, warmhearted debut film, A Love Song, opens with several shots of lone wildflowers surviving in the dry, bare terrain of a Colorado campgrounds. Harshness and beauty are...
View ArticleAli & Ava
The first thing one might notice about writer/director Clio Barnard’s Ali & Ava is that all of its characters are complete originals. Perhaps the general trajectory of the story, which follows an...
View ArticleThe Moderator
One key moment in The Moderator reveals director Zhor Fassi-Fihri’s film to be a morally reprehensible one, and the rest of the production only manages to highlight how cheaply produced and...
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Rediscover: The Damned
In his masterpiece, The Leopard (1963), director Luchino Visconti used Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel of the same name to explore the dissolution of Italy’s past via the collapse of one noble...
View ArticleSharp Stick
Sharp Stick, Lena Dunham’s first project at the creative helm since the ending of her quite wonderful HBO series Girls some five years ago, retains the same basic style as the show while making some...
View ArticleParadise Highway
Jean-Luc Godard said all he needed to make a movie was a girl and a gun. With her terrific first feature, writer-director Anna Gutto demonstrates that all you need is Juliette Binoche driving a truck....
View ArticleCriminally Underrated: Everybody Wants Some!!
Richard Linklater makes two kinds of films. The first kind—the ones that have made him one of the more highly regarded US-American directors of his generation—are searing dramas that push at the...
View ArticleBullet Train
Bullet Train may not be the worst action film released in the past year or even the past month, but it is the strongest indication yet the genre is circling the drain. At first, there is a promise of...
View ArticleOeuvre: Scorsese: Mean Streets
Revisiting any established director’s early work tends to be illuminating, the crude outlines of early style helping to clarify ideas and concepts that will come into clearer focus with more...
View ArticleThe Most Dangerous Game
Liberties can and should be taken when adapting a work of literary fiction into something cinematic. In the case of “The Most Dangerous Game,” liberties might be a necessity, unless one was making a...
View ArticleI Love My Dad
James Morosini, the writer/director/star of I Love My Dad, claims his dark comedy is based on a true story. It is alarming gambit, since it depicts a disturbing relationship where a codependent father...
View ArticleEl Gran Movimiento
The fascination of El Gran Movimiento doesn’t reside so much in its story, which is simple enough, but in the many beguiling and transporting detours the film takes along the way to tracing its main...
View ArticleRevisit: Inside Llewyn Davis
Released in 2013, Inside Llewyn Davis remains the Coen brothers’ last truly great cinematic output as a filmmaking duo. Two other projects have since followed: the six-part Netflix anthology film The...
View ArticleThey/Them
John Logan’s They/Them attempts to grapple with longstanding issues of queer representation in horror, where gay and trans characters’ isolation from “normal” society manifests as aberrant, often...
View ArticleFrom the Vaults of Streaming Hell: The Monster and the Girl
The Streaming Hell column is generally deployed for the worst genre pictures that our staff has unearthed — and been able to sit through, more than likely with clenched jaws and/or eyes propped open...
View ArticleCarter
Every once in a while, a film comes along that isn’t merely a viewing experience but a sheer sensory assault, a cinematic whirlwind wholly committed to indulging in its creator’s vision and stylistic...
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