Revoir Paris
They have removed the handmade memorial crosses from the Allen Premium Outlets in Allen, Texas, where, on May 6, 2023 (and just ten minutes from where this critic lives as of this writing), a gunman...
View ArticleRediscover: Medicine for Melancholy
In a conversation late into Medicine for Melancholy, a character asks, “How do you define yourself?” It’s a question that many young adults think about during a time of rapid change and development. Is...
View ArticlePrisoner’s Daughter
Everything seems to be going wrong for Maxine (Kate Beckinsale) at the start of Prisoner’s Daughter. She’s hit the delinquency period on her rent. Her son Ezra (Christopher Convery) is nearly kicked...
View ArticleThe Unseen
One of the cardinal sins of supernatural horror is overexplaining disturbing phenomena. Fear of the unknown is a powerful thing. Part of what makes The Exorcist so iconic is its lack of explanation for...
View ArticleThe Passengers of the Night
Like the late-night radio program at the intersection of the narrative arc in the film, The Passengers of the Night presents a story that seems at first glance ordinary but becomes beguiling and...
View ArticleUmberto Eco: A Library of the World
The camera that follows the author through his winding shelves as Umberto Eco: A Library of the World opens doesn’t exactly capture the awestruck experience one has when they enter the world’s great...
View ArticleRevisit: Boiler Room
One suspects that the lead characters in Boiler Room would love The Wolf of Wall Street. Martin Scorsese’s three-hour epic about greed, drugs, and sex premiered to a plethora of reactions in 2017,...
View ArticleOeuvre: Altman: McCabe & Mrs. Miller
Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller opens with a long tracking shot by the great cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond that follows John “Pudgy” McCabe (Warren Beatty) as he exits the lush greenery of a...
View ArticleIndiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
Indiana Jones movies have always been nostalgic. When audiences were first introduced to the archeologist over 40 years ago, Steven Spielberg and his collaborators drew from matinee serials from the...
View ArticleBiosphere
In Jurassic Park, the line “Life finds a way” is a repeated refrain. It elegantly summarizes the folly of a dinosaur theme park: even with strict biological control, previously extinct animals can...
View ArticleRevisit: Harriet the Spy
Before she portrayed everyone’s favorite troublemaker Georgina Sparks on The CW’s hit teen drama “Gossip Girl,” Michelle Trachtenberg played the very different yet still devious lead role in the 1996...
View ArticleEarth Mama
Interspersed throughout Earth Mama are segments where unnamed characters face the camera and talk about their inner lives. In a world of structural inequality, some grew up in broken families while...
View ArticleAmanda
Friendship, for the titular Amanda, is an unsolvable riddle attached to a time bomb. That’s not a literal description of the conflict, but it suggests the panic and intensity on the young woman’s face...
View ArticleMission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Part One
At particular moments during Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Part One, it’s possible to ignore the color and sound and imagine you’re watching a clip from one of the masters of silent cinema....
View ArticleThe League
The American obsession with baseball, our national pastime, involves more than home runs and World Series winners. It is an obsession with narrative as well as statistics, all in the pursuit of...
View ArticleHoly Hell: King of the Ants Turns 20
When one thinks of the works of the late Stuart Gordon, certain imagery likely comes to mind. Jeffrey Combs, tentacled eldritch beasts, oozing gooey gore, B-movie seams deftly molded into rollicking...
View ArticleThe YouTube Effect
To address the elephant in the room right out of the gate, yes, it likely never would have been possible for any filmmaker/documentarian to cover the entire history and impact of easily the most...
View ArticleOeuvre: Altman: Images
It’s fitting that Robert Altman’s 1972 drama Images is so preoccupied with lenses, mirrors and reflections as it’s a masterclass in showing rather than telling. It’s an evocation of a mental breakdown,...
View ArticleThe Miracle Club
The Miracle Club does not begin with an abundance of promise. Everything about this movie is based around and upon melodrama of the highest order, but it’s somehow never clearer than in the opening 15...
View ArticleFinal Cut
The most satisfying way to watch zombie-themed comedy horror Final Cut likely would be to go in without any foreknowledge. Michel Hazanavicius’ French remake of Shin’ichirô Ueda’s One Cut of the Dead...
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