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Revisit: The Velvet Underground
Great avant-garde art eventually becomes canon. The idea of a Paris audience rioting over Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring seems as quaint as Parisians running to the doors of a different theater,...
View ArticleBroker
Under most circumstances, abortion was illegal in South Korea until the beginning of 2021. This is the setting of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s new film, Broker, which begins when a young mother, So-young (Lee...
View ArticleAlcarràs
In her tenderly heartbreaking and acutely observed debut film, Summer 1993, director Carla Simón evoked both a strong sense of place in the Spanish countryside setting and deftly filtered familial...
View ArticleLiving
With Living, director Oliver Hermanus takes on an intimidating challenge: to remake one of the best films from one of the great filmmakers. The film is Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru, that transcendental...
View ArticleLast Resort
As an action-thriller, Last Resort is utterly unremarkable, with the possible exception of its acting ensemble, not a single member of which gives anything resembling even a passable performance. It...
View ArticleHoly Hell! Master & Commander: The Far Side of the World Turns 20
In early 2021, Peter Weir’s 2003 seafaring adventure film, Master & Commander: The Far Side of the World, surprisingly became a trending topic on Twitter after a young user suggested watching it as...
View ArticleNo Bears
Iranian director Jafar Panahi is renowned for his naturalistic, character-focused works. And he’s currently in prison. Panahi has been arrested by the Iranian government numerous times, and banned him...
View ArticleOeuvre: Scorsese: Bringing Out the Dead
The protagonists of writer and director Paul Schrader find comfort in solitude. Think about Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver or Ernst Toller in First Reformed, men making sense of their despair in their...
View ArticleA Man Called Otto
There’s a distinct compassion disguised by cynicism in Marc Forster’s A Man Called Otto that tricks us into thinking its protagonist is a cold, lonely old man. But this is far from the truth as we’re...
View ArticlePlane
The most surprising thing about Plane is its restraint. Scottish actor Gerard Butler has developed a cottage industry for B-grade action thrillers, and his latest certainly succeeds on those terms. But...
View ArticleThe Offering
Possession horror typically weaponizes Catholic iconography in the battle against demons. Shouted Latin, brandished crucifixes, splashed holy water and gesticulated black leather-bound books can make...
View ArticleSkinamarink
Dreams often come to us only half-remembered. What’s visible so clearly in the moment becomes a grainy blur just seconds after we wake, as if our brains have abruptly switched off whatever alternate...
View ArticleRevisit: The Long Goodbye
Private detective stories have never really gone out of style, and why would they? Since the days of Edgar Allen Poe’s crime fiction, the genre has proven to be endlessly adaptable, reflecting the...
View ArticleGunfight at Rio Bravo
The first wrong note of Gunfight at Rio Bravo lands with the opening shot where the words “East Texas, 1873” appear superimposed on an image of rugged mesas in a sunblasted desert. You wonder where in...
View ArticleSaint Omer
Saint Omer begins at a university where Rama (Kayjie Kagame) lectures on Marguerite Duras and her screenplay to the 1959 romantic drama film Hiroshima mon amour. Duras’ work examines female characters...
View ArticleThe Devil Conspiracy
In the world of The Devil Conspiracy, the latest scientific breakthrough involves the cloning of human DNA, which has led to another phenomenon of unthinkable proportions: The “resurrection” of the...
View ArticleFrom the Vaults of Streaming Hell: Shock Waves
Nazis and zombies make effective cinematic monsters. Compelled by a force beyond will, and with essentially no minds of their own, they also make for good kills, their gory deaths ethically...
View ArticleWomen Talking
Relevance is not something that can be consciously manufactured. Something either has relevance, or it does not. That does not stop folks from straining toward relevance, and few things are more...
View ArticleOeuvre: Scorsese: Gangs of New York
It seems impossible to review Gangs of New York without mentioning its troubled production history, as Martin Scorsese acquired the rights to a nonfiction book by Herbert Asbury in the late ‘70s but...
View ArticleBlaze
Just when you thought magical realism had well and truly had its day (and then some), along comes a movie to remind you: done right, the day for any style of filmmaking is any day. Blaze, the debut...
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