Close to Vermeer
The recent trend of selfie-friendly exhibits and immersive experiences with the great masters is discouraging for the museum lover who’d simply like a quiet moment to sit and appreciate a favorite work...
View ArticleWill O’ the Wisp
Will O’ the Wisp, Portuguese auteur João Pedro Rodrigues’ latest, is a transcendent exploration of the senses. Taken at face value, the 67-minute film has enough political rhetoric, full-frontal nudity...
View ArticleEnter the Slipstream
To its credit, Enter the Slipstream keeps its story relatively straightforward and its focus appreciably narrowed on one particular subject out of however many could theoretically have taken the...
View ArticleFrom the Vaults of Streaming Hell: Invaders from Mars
The highs and lows of famed horror director Tobe Hooper’s career are striking in their contrast. On the one hand, he directed popular classics like the Steven Spielberg production Poltergeist and the...
View ArticleWhite Balls on Walls
Just as we experienced a shift in the ways we live when COVID-19 first hit, there was also another reckoning going on throughout cultures as more and more people began pushing for diversity and...
View ArticleOeuvre: Altman: Countdown
If Robert Altman is known for anything, it’s his dialogue. Assessing a roughly 40-year career, it’s easy to identify how this element operates in his work, functioning as a connective web enveloping...
View ArticleSpider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
They did it. They – writer-producers Phil Lord and Chris Miller (along with screenwriter David Callaham) – did it. They – directors Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers and Justin K. Thompson – did it. They...
View ArticlePast Lives
We will always be outsiders to those whose stories we view on screen. It’s one of the central appeals of storytelling: to grant us the illusion of interiority into perspectives that would otherwise be...
View ArticleRediscover: But I’m a Cheerleader
Occasionally the best therapy is one’s sense of humor, which happens to be the advice Jamie Babbit’s 1999 camp cult classic But I’m a Cheerleader gave to a freshmen generation of queer youth. Tired of...
View ArticleUnidentified Objects
When you put two characters in a car together and make them travel across the country, it’s pretty much guaranteed that Things Will Happen. And things will definitely happen when one of the characters...
View ArticleLynch/Oz
“There is not a day that goes by that I don’t think about The Wizard of Oz.” Filmmaker Karyn Kusama, one of five narrators in Lynch/Oz, shares this quote which she witnessed from David Lynch during a...
View ArticleSimulant
Here is a movie replete with ideas, except for those about what to do with them. Simulant arrives in theaters at potentially the most perfect time possible and by complete accident. The threat posed by...
View ArticleCriminally Underrated: Ironclad
If you loved swords, knights or heroic fantasy in the barren era before Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring made such things viable at the box office, there was a long period where aside from...
View ArticleOeuvre: Altman: That Cold Day in the Park
Assessing a film like That Cold Day in the Park is all about picking out the specific elements that would later define its director’s illustrious career. Taken on its own terms, this 1969 psychological...
View ArticleThe Angry Black Girl and Her Monster
The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster owes to James Whale and Mary Shelley equally. While writer and director Bomani J. Story signals lofty goals with allusions to the Frankenstein novel, there are also...
View ArticleBlue Jean
Set in 1988 at the dubious peak of Thatcherism in Great Britain, director Georgia Oakley’s hauntingly tense Blue Jean is a period piece, but much of its content reflects eerily onto the present. The...
View ArticleScarlet
Co-writer/director Pietro Marcello is going for something very specific with Scarlet, an adaptation (of sorts) of Alexander Grin’s novel Scarlet Sails, set in a time of war and uncertainty. The...
View ArticleRevisit: Shoot the Piano Player
There’s a moment midway through Francois Truffaut’s 1960 film Shoot the Piano Player when it seems it’s on the brink of shifting its story. The protagonist, Charlie, hesitates before entering the...
View ArticleAmericonned
Taking on income inequality is no easy task. Arguably, the gargantuan social plight is embedded within the fabric of America, splaying calcified tentacles throughout its institutions and gaining...
View ArticleHoly Hell! Tokyo Godfathers Turns 20
When thinking about Christmas films, Satoshi Kon may not be the first filmmaker that comes to mind. His work is distinctive and can often be mind-bending, examining the gray area where fiction and...
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