Missing
Just prior to the advanced screening of Missing, two theater employees loudly discussed the film’s title. “They’re so similar!” One exclaimed, “first there’s Searching, then Missing, what’s the third...
View ArticleRediscover: Floating Clouds
An air of heartbreak and unfulfilled romanticism pervades Mikio Naruse’s Floating Clouds, a movie that presents life as a series of cascading letdowns and disappointments. Based on a novel by Fumiko...
View ArticleWhen You Finish Saving the World
Jesse Eisenberg proves to have a unique eye for observing awkwardness in social situations and coldness in family dynamics in his directorial debut, When You Finish Saving the World. Tackling the...
View ArticleAlice, Darling
Alice, Darling is a big screen domestic thriller of the variety that generally lives on basic cable, specifically Lifetime (unfortunate former tagline: “Television for Women”). The plot is about as...
View ArticleKids vs. Aliens
Technically, it is true that Kids vs. Aliens is about a group of rowdy kids and a couple of older teenagers battling against the extraterrestrial threat of aliens. After all, it’s right there in the...
View ArticleThe Pale Blue Eye
Scott Cooper has had a bizarre career. Ever since his feature debut, Crazy Heart, won an Oscar, Cooper has opted for genre films that land with a palpable sense of shame. That is not to say that Black...
View ArticleHoly Hell! Elephant Turns 20
Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, which premiered at Cannes and won the Palm d’Or back in 2003, is a film that has only become less and less watchable with time. It is not uncommon for a film to strike a chord...
View ArticleOeuvre: Scorsese: Feel Like Going Home
From the outset, music has been a consistent element of Martin Scorsese’s career, utilized via a signature jukebox model in which familiar songs enhance, tweak or amplify the feelings evoked onscreen....
View ArticleClose
Especially as children, we love purely and unconditionally. Love can be an expression that extends not just to our families but to our closest friends, since the psychological boundaries have not yet...
View ArticleKompromat
It is normal for a film to begin with a title card informing us that it is based on a true story. What is intriguing about Kompromat, the new dramatic French thriller, is the addition of the word...
View ArticleInfinity Pool
Where David Cronenberg’s movies use their icky transformations and disintegrations as fodder for sneakily brilliant interrogations of sex (eXistenZ, Crash), disease (The Fly, Naked Lunch) and violence...
View ArticleOne Fine Morning
In One Fine Morning, writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve sees life in a constant balance where moments of grief and loss coexist with those of joy. The film opens when Sandra (Léa Seydoux), a 30-something...
View ArticleThe Man in the Basement
Whatever its shortcomings, the premise of The Man in the Basement prods a primal nerve within the context of an important conversation being had in the culture right now. In director Philippe Le Guay’s...
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Revisit: For All Mankind
It’s easy to feel divided by man’s voyage into outer space. On one hand, it’s the defining achievement of manifest destiny, a still-inexplicable feat of science and luck that has transported not only...
View ArticleThe Silent Forest
Many films hinge on characters uncovering dark secrets by digging through the past, but few do so quite as literally as German film The Silent Forest. Set in 1999, the directorial debut of Saralisa...
View ArticleLife Upside Down
In the early days of the pandemic of March 2020, many of us probably had the urge to document the bizarre experience. The world was grinding to a halt, and millions of us were trapped in our homes with...
View ArticleFrom the Vaults of Streaming Hell: Back to Q82
At some point in 2017, driven either by an unknown ambition or the desire for a quick tax write-off, director Ahmed Siddiqui decided that the world really needed a Kuwaiti version of Back to the...
View ArticleShotgun Wedding
Shotgun Wedding is meant to have broad appeal. It is a romantic comedy crossed with Die Hard, the kind of movie that fans of traditionally masculine or feminine genres are meant to enjoy. There is...
View ArticleOeuvre: Scorsese The Aviator
With Raging Bull, Martin Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader reconfigured the traditional structure of the biopic to focus intently, almost obsessively, on the self-destructive drive and violent...
View Article80 for Brady
Sometimes all we need is a fabulous display of female friendship to remind us that we’re never too old for shenanigans, of which there is no shortage of in Kyle Marvin’s debut, 80 for Brady. With a...
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