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Oeuvre: Scorsese: Raging Bull
Perhaps the most refreshing element of Raging Bull—and a plot structure that makes it feel decidedly old-fashioned—is that Scorsese and De Niro just allow protagonist Jake La Motta to be who he is...
View ArticleSmile
Smile is a nasty, effective film that takes the hip “horror can be a metaphor for trauma” trope and turns it on its head. Many smaller, more independently-minded films such as The Night House and Relic...
View ArticleBros
In a deleted scene from Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up, Jonah Hill goes on a rant about Brokeback Mountain. His point is well-taken: its depiction of gay sex did not need to be so timid and chaste (of...
View ArticleThe Good House
Sigourney Weaver brings a level of prestige to any project she appears in, and she’s by far the best part of The Good House, a comedy-drama that stretches for a redemptive arc at the expense of...
View ArticleVesper
Directors Kristina Buozyte and Bruno Samper (who-co-wrote the script with Brian Clark) hit the nail on the head when setting up the world and the atmosphere in Vesper, a sci-fi thriller set in some...
View ArticleOeuvre: Scorsese: The King of Comedy
Robert De Niro’s collaborations with Martin Scorsese from Mean Streets through The King of Comedy were responsible for some of the most unwavering and distressing examinations of toxic masculinity in...
View ArticleMona Lisa and the Blood Moon
If there’s any value in writing what you know, as the old advice goes, it’s evidently a value not known by Ana Lily Amirpour. To date, the British-born Iranian-American filmmaker has helmed several...
View ArticleGod’s Creatures
The windswept Irish fishing village at the center of Saela Davis and Anna Rose Holmer’s atmospheric new drama God’s Creatures has no name. The sky is perpetually overcast, houses creak ceaselessly in...
View ArticleRevisit: Predator 2
Released in 1987, John McTiernan’s Predator is a lean, sinewy pulp masterpiece, pitting a top-form crew of Hollywood’s finest hunks against an otherworldly menace out for human blood. Applying the teen...
View ArticleSpirit Halloween: The Movie
When you decide to make a movie based on perhaps the biggest chain of Halloween superstores in America, you immediately run the risk of a 90-minute long, glorified advertisement for over-priced...
View ArticleMasking Threshold
Found footage and “screen life” films have brought audiences closer than ever into characters’ perspectives. Some, like Hardcore Henry and 2012’s remake of Maniac, even drop viewers directly into...
View ArticleCriminally Underrated: None Shall Escape
As a journeyman director in Hollywood from the late ‘30s through the ‘60s, André de Toth displayed a mastery of numerous genres. His best and most widely acclaimed film, Day of the Outlaw, is a...
View ArticleThe American Dream and Other Fairytales
The American Dream and Other Fairytales is a full-feature documentary from activist Abigail Disney and co-director Kathleen Hughes. Abigail Disney is an heir to the Disney fortune, although she has no...
View ArticleNothing Compares
Sinéad O’Connor possesses a voice powerful and rare, one that emerges from someplace completely out of time. Her music cuts to the emotional core of her personal experience while carrying the beauty...
View ArticleOeuvre: Scorsese: After Hours
After the decade-long run of critical and commercial successes centered around volcanic Robert De Niro performances, Martin Scorsese had established a reputation as a chronicler of the dark macho id....
View ArticleAmsterdam
After experimenting a little with genre, filmmaker David O. Russell has settled into a career of making dialogue-driven comedic dramas. Some of his efforts are more successful than others – the less we...
View ArticleProject Wolf Hunting
Ever since Timo Tjahjanto’s Indonesian ultra-violent martial arts film The Night Comes for Us released in 2018, it has seemed to loom over the genre space as the current benchmark for splatter-heavy...
View ArticlePiggy
Bullying often compels righteous vengeance within storytelling, particularly when it comes to the horror genre. Just ask Stephen King. The world’s most famous horror writer frequently features bullies...
View ArticleSome Like It Rare
The term “dark humor” has unfortunately largely become synonymous with insufferable edgelords and those who use the phrase as a guise for insisting on being contrarian within the social zeitgeist. And...
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Revisit: Lost Highway
Lost Highway capped off a critical backlash against David Lynch that lasted for almost the entire ‘90s. Like its direct predecessors, Wild at Heart and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Lynch’s 1997...
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