Oeuvre: Scorsese: A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American...
Martin Scorsese is a movies guy. Even more than a chronicler of urban grit or macho toxicity or criminal instinct or any of the other themes that pervade his films, that’s the main thing he is. In...
View ArticleThere There
Andrew Bujalski makes films that are seemingly the epitome of “minor works,” until they very much aren’t. The first three (and parts of the fourth) of his off-the-cuff, blatantly low-budget films were...
View ArticleTaurus
If ever there were a pop star in desperate need of artistic legitimization, it’s Machine Gun Kelly. Talented though he may be, he’s known less in some quarters for his musical output than for his image...
View ArticleActual People
“What are you going to do after graduation?” The question is asked of our often anxious and utterly directionless protagonist at least three, maybe four, times across the running time of Actual People,...
View ArticleGlass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
Miles calls himself a disruptor. To him, there is no higher compliment, no greater aspiration than upending the status quo. He explains the term “disruptor” to Benoit Blanc, the chicken-fried detective...
View ArticleBones and All
Maren (Taylor Russell) is a soft-spoken teenager with too few friends living a fairly hardscrabble, impermanent life in Maryland with her father (André Holland) in the late 1980s. When a violent...
View ArticleThe Fabelmans
Steven Spielberg did not do his best work in the 2010s. Out of seven features, only Lincoln (2012) will likely be remembered as a classic. The rest are well-made but weary films that fail to inspire...
View ArticleRediscover: Columbus
Columbus, the first feature film from director and writer Kogonada, is an unexpectedly moving and still film. Set in Columbus, Indiana, the film follows the lives of Casey (played by Haley Lu...
View ArticleAll the Beauty and the Bloodshed
There’s a telling quote from The Other Side, artist Nan Goldin’s second full collection of photography, which chronicles a portion of her life living with and amongst drag queens in ‘70s New York City....
View ArticleWhite Noise
If you stare at anything long enough, a pattern will emerge. Americans used to regularly confront this truth when television programming ended sometime after midnight and the local network affiliate...
View ArticleNanny
At the center of Nanny is the deeply emotional story of a woman just trying to do her best for her child. It is simply a matter of writer/director Nikyatu Jusu, making her feature debut in the latter...
View ArticleFrom the Vaults of Streaming Hell: Bees in Paradise
The IMDb summary for a certain 1944 British musical comedy seems to have a lot of camp potential: “During World War II, a plane crashes on an island of domineering women.” What’s not to love? But Bees...
View ArticleBattle for Saipan
There is nothing new under the sun in Battle for Saipan, though the way writer-director Brandon Slagle has chosen to tell this story is quite discomforting. The film is set on the island of Saipan in...
View ArticleOeuvre: Scorsese: Casino
The release of Casino in November 1995 came with the weight of unfair, if understandable, expectations. Martin Scorsese had only released Goodfellas five years previously, and this re-teamed the great...
View ArticleNeil Young: Harvest Time
It’s quite a harvest: previously unreleased footage of one of modern American music’s most metamorphic artists, back before he had yet earned such a reputation. The Neil Young of Harvest Time (using...
View ArticleViolent Night
Recent years have seen a move towards more cynical entertainment. Corniness cannot exist without a dose of self-aware snark to bitter the brew, like a shot of ricin in your eggnog. Yes, yuletide cheer...
View ArticleHunt
Directorial debuts tend to arrive in one of a few guises. There are the conceptual ones: assembled from their makers’ ideas and interests, prone to sloppiness and instability. There are the simple...
View ArticleThe Eternal Daughter
Viewers familiar with the recent work of filmmaker Joanna Hogg will recognize early on in her latest film, The Eternal Daughter, that it’s a stealth sequel, or rather continuation, to her two prior...
View ArticleFraming Agnes
The essay film, as a genre, is at once one of the most celebrated and one of the most overlooked species of film. Great essay filmmakers like Dziga Vertov, Jonas Mekas and Chantal Akerman have been...
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Revisit: Miller’s Crossing
Though Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas will be remembered as the best gangster film to emerge from the year 1990, Joel and Ethan Coen’s Miller’s Crossing shouldn’t be dismissed. Something must have been...
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