It Ain’t Over
If you were born in the past half century, you’re likely more familiar with the late Yogi Berra as a cultural icon than as a ballplayer. In the late innings of his life, the man born Lorenzo Pietro...
View ArticleCriminally Underrated: Road to Perdition
While not exactly overlooked, as it was a critical and commercial success when it came out, even winning an Oscar for Best Cinematography, Road to Perdition remains conspicuously absent from Best-Of...
View ArticleOeuvre: Altman: The Delinquents
After nearly a decade directing industrial documentaries and educational short films, Robert Altman made his feature-length directorial debut with what is essentially a classy public service...
View ArticleFast X
Invite yourself to consider, is there a more improbably successful, or indeed, simply improbable franchise in the entirety of cinematic history than The Fast and the Furious? What began in 2001 as a...
View ArticleMonica
Narratively, Monica belongs squarely in the active sub-genre of family drama where the protagonist(s) are tasked with taking care of aging or otherwise ill parents. The genre was, if not quite...
View ArticleSanctuary
The challenge with making compelling art about kinks is finding the humanity in peculiar proclivities that, by definition, are outside mainstream appreciation or understanding. Focus too much on the...
View ArticleRediscover: The Empty Man
It’s not often that films arrive as unjustly dead-on-arrival as The Empty Man. The directorial debut of David Prior, who first cut his teeth creating behind the scenes documentaries for David Fincher,...
View ArticleMoon Garden
It’s hard to really describe director Ryan Stevens Harris’s Moon Garden. It’s a movie that’s both incredibly familiar and surprisingly revelatory. Shot on expired 35mm film, its visuals instantly draw...
View ArticleMaster Gardener
Order is a governing force in the cinema of Paul Schrader. Whether it’s Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver and Jake VanDorn in Hardcore striving, in their own demented way, to impose their morality within...
View ArticleStay Awake
Over the past decade, America’s opioid epidemic has been brought to our screens either through documentary or dramatization. These have focused on the drugs’ manipulative resurgence and the impending...
View ArticleThe Cow Who Sang a Song into the Future
The principal character of the Chilean film The Cow Who Sang a Song into the Future never says a word but manages to transmit volumes of emotion via her eyes, facial expressions and periodic grunts—and...
View ArticleMercy
Cribbing rather liberally from 1988’s Die Hard is a concept that will not die within the action genre anytime soon, it seems, and Mercy does so again – though, to the film’s credit, director Tony Dean...
View ArticleHoly Hell! Young Adam Turns 20
Thanks to some superb central performances, David Mackenzie’s 2003 bleak experiment in Scottish Gothic is often remembered as a kind of love triangle, which is misleading on two counts. Firstly,...
View ArticleWhite Building
Director Kavich Neang’s highly personal White Building tells a familiar story of teenage dreams and real estate nightmares. But even if its basic plot is old hat and fairly predictable, the intimate...
View ArticleOeuvre: Altman: The James Dean Story
There are few figures in American film history whose careers were as brief and yet as notable as James Dean’s. After starring in only three films — Rebel Without a Cause (1955), East of Eden (1995) and...
View ArticleKandahar
In August of 2021, the nation watched as the United States Armed Forces completed their withdrawal from Afghanistan. For those who followed the media coverage, there were terrifying images of Afghan...
View ArticleAbout My Father
You’ve seen this movie before, and everyone knows it. “It’s a field that’s been plowed before, but it’s really heartfelt,” co-star David Rasche (HBO’s Succession) recently stated in an interview, less...
View ArticleThe Wrath of Becky
Between the recent releases of Sisu and Blood & Gold, cinematic Nazi killing is booming, and three years after mulching a skinhead with a lawnmower, adolescent murder machine Becky is back to join...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Revisit: Wings of Desire
More a tone poem or a mediation on existence, Wim Wenders’ modern classic Wings of Desire is anything but a narrative film that relies on plot points and telegraphic filmic gimmicks. In the film,...
View ArticleYou Hurt My Feelings
Especially in her films during the last decade, Nicole Holofcener’s instincts as a writer-director can get in the way of her strengths. Her best work is naturalistic and unconcerned with how a gesture...
View Article