32 Sounds
The documentary 32 Sounds unfolds like a podcast. The image is mostly incidental to director Sam Green, to the point where the film has an interactive portion where he asks the viewer to close their...
View ArticleR.M.N.
The world is rarely as grey as it is in writer/director Cristian Mungiu’s R.M.N., a deliberate but provocative cautionary tale set within a closed community whose inhabitants believe they occupy a...
View ArticleBorn to Fly
Born to Fly is a film with a backstory much more interesting than the movie itself. One quick glance at the poster tells you everything you need to know: this is a Chinese version of Top Gun, right...
View ArticleThe Black Demon
What evil could be lurking in the picturesque waters off the Baja coast? Could it be…nature’s revenge? The Black Demon is yet another shark movie — specifically, another megalodon thriller — and in...
View ArticleNuclear Now
When most people hear the words “nuclear power,” their first thoughts likely go to destruction. Older generations may recall first seeing the horrific images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Others grew up...
View ArticleHoly Hell! Los Angeles Plays Itself Turns 20
Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself is one of the best essay films ever made. Not only is it a moving investigation of the movies that are created there – told by the movies themselves – it’s a...
View ArticleOeuvre: Scorsese: Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese
A clue that something is a little off comes very near the beginning of Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese, after a cartwheel through the early ‘70s highlights the U.S. campaign...
View ArticleGuardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
We almost never got Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. Pre-production on the long-awaited threequel was thrown into serious question after James Gunn’s sudden firing from Disney in 2018, which came after...
View ArticleWhat’s Love Got to Do with It?
The enduring appeal of the romantic-comedy lies in the withholding of the pay-off, along with the audience’s investment in who gets together with whom. Like a murder mystery, there are ringers and red...
View ArticleChile ‘76
If a director includes a year in the title of their film, then they imbue it with heft. Such a gambit is a kind of promise, a suggestion that what the viewer is about to see is an authoritative account...
View ArticleRevisit: Field of Dreams
While its contemporary cachet has diminished, there was a time when Field of Dreams was an omnipresent cultural object, the subject of countless references and primitive, pre-Internet memes, mostly...
View ArticleAnxious Nation
It’s no secret that anxiety is a major mental health problem in America. The pandemic made this point glaringly obvious when many individuals struggled under lockdown, turning to their doctors and...
View ArticleFrom the Vaults of Streaming Hell: Wyrmwood: Apocalypse
Fast zombies? Old news. Slow zombies? Half-century old news. Not-quite-dead infected? Done to death. Pet zombies, smart zombies, fungal zombie, cured reintegrated-into-society zombies? Seen all that....
View ArticleQueens of the Qing Dynasty
In a landscape smothered in snow, where functional, harshly lit mid-20th Century buildings perch incongruously by deserted roadsides, where every other person seems consumed by the grinding demand of...
View ArticleOeuvre: Scorsese: The Irishman
Upon its release, there was a great deal of conversation about various aspects of The Irishman. None of the discussion was about the substance of the film itself, however, but instead was focused on...
View ArticleBlackBerry
Like The Social Network, which was less about Facebook and more about personalities, handheld devices with physical keyboards are almost ancillary to BlackBerry. In the hands of director Matt Johnson,...
View ArticleThe Eight Mountains
They become fast friends out of necessity. On a remote village in the Italian Alps, two boys run and play through stunning landscapes, a kind of idyll that shapes both their lives. The Eight Mountains...
View ArticleThe Starling Girl
In communities where Christianity isn’t just an occasional Sunday church service but an ingrained way of life, shame is often used as a method of coercion. It is wielded in a way to maintain control,...
View ArticleRevisit: The Others
(Writer’s note: In case you have yet to see The Others, it would be wise to do so before reading this review, which explicitly discusses details of its final revelation.) The horror-movie twist turns...
View ArticleFool’s Paradise
Charlie Day, the writer and director of Fool’s Paradise, is not shy about his influences. Best known for his work on the long-running sitcom It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Day’s feature-length...
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