The Inventor
For a film about a hugely influential polymath who often blurred the lines between science and art, The Inventor fittingly alternates between animation styles as it chronicles the final years of...
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Revisit: Moonage Daydream
David Bowie’s artistic persona was so mutable during his six-decade career that even his death in 2016 initially felt, to some, like an act. Of course, it wasn’t. Bowie, privately suffering from liver...
View ArticleRadical Wolfe
At a minimum, a biographical documentary should illuminate its subject. It is a success, however modest, when the viewer walks away with new understanding or appreciation. Radical Wolfe, the...
View ArticleCriminally Underrated: Vertical Limit
Fresh off the double home runs of revitalizing Zorro and James Bond for a new generation, director Martin Campbell took his blank check and made… Vertical Limit. A survival action flick for the new...
View ArticleRobe of Gems
Building toward inevitable tragedy and inescapable violence, Robe of Gems is a slow burn without any interest in easy audience satisfaction or mercy. That sometimes comes at the cost of the film’s...
View ArticleOeuvre: Altman: HealtH
Nearly lost to time and obscurity, as an unfortunate result of its absence on home video and subsequent disappearance from any kind of cultural conversation, HealtH is a forgotten gem from that...
View ArticleIt Lives Inside
Apart from being difficult to properly pull off, horror cinema also has a complicated history when it comes to representation. In recent years, filmmakers have made a marked effort to redefine some of...
View ArticleNightsiren
“Witch hunt” has become such an overused phrase, especially by disgraced politicians with bad comb-overs, that it’s easy to pass off the term’s sobering real-life origins as something of the past....
View ArticleFlora and Son
To fully understand John Carney’s latest comedy-musical, we have to visualize a time when a piece of music has changed us; be it the liberation of dancing in a club with your gorgeous friends, the...
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Spectrum Culture Goes to Fantastic Fest: Part One
Austin’s best-known film festival may be SXSW, but Fantastic Fest might be its best. Created by the Alamo Drafthouse founder Tim League, it offers the best in genre filmmaking: horror, sci-fi, fantasy,...
View ArticleRediscover: We Live in Public
Being a prophet isn’t easy, especially when your prophecies are at least two decades ahead of the curve — and also, you suck. Arguably the first true ‘bad boy of tech’ (a viscerally uncool term,...
View ArticleThe Origin of Evil
The opening scene of Sébastien Marnier’s latest film The Origin of Evil is set in a women’s locker room where the camera moves ominously down the rows, lingering on the women in various stages of...
View ArticleThe Storms of Jeremy Thomas
It is one thing, as a documentarian, to approach a project with a proportional sense of the personal in contrast to the informative. It is something else entirely to inject oneself into an exploration...
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Spectrum Culture Goes To Fantastic Fest Part Two
Austin’s best-known film festival may be SXSW, but Fantastic Fest might be its best. Created by the Alamo Drafthouse founder Tim League, it offers the best in genre filmmaking: horror, sci-fi, fantasy,...
View ArticleRelax, I’m From the Future
Keeping the idea of time travel and its multi-universal consequences fresh has become quite a challenge for the modern filmmaker. Quantum time travel has been volleyed everywhere from sci-fi indies to...
View ArticleHoly Hell! Oldboy turns 20
There’s a scene in the first part of director Park Chan-Wook’s Vengeance trilogy, 2002’s Vengeance is Mine, (weirdly retitled Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance for western markets) where the father of a...
View ArticleOeuvre: Altman: Popeye
For about 30 minutes, it looks like Popeye is going to be a total disaster. In many ways, it was. Coming off a critically-lauded decade that included films like The Long Goodbye, Nashville and McCabe...
View ArticleFair Play
Maybe no-dating policies in the workplace are a good idea. That’s certainly one of the takeaways, though undoubtedly a shallow one, from Chloe Domont’s fiery directorial debut Fair Play, which was a...
View ArticleStory Ave
Aristotle Torres’ Story Ave hits the beats of a coming of age story, but uses its urban Bronx setting to create a distinct world. High school student and street artist Kadir (Asante Blackk) is on the...
View ArticleThe Kill Room
Within the first two minutes of the alarmingly mediocre art farce/crime caper mash up The Kill Room, director Nicol Paone’s images slaps the visage and fell of mid ‘90s to early 2000s crime noir films...
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