Anatomy of a Fall
Truth is elusive in Anatomy of a Fall, a courtroom drama that takes a simple incident–one that happens offscreen in a matter of seconds–and wrings all the cinematic potential out of it. Not unlike the...
View ArticleThe Mission
In 2018, American missionary John Allen Chau contacted one of the world’s most isolated Indigenous peoples, the Sentinelese, who lived on North Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal in the northeastern...
View ArticleCat Person
Many a great movie has been based on a work of short fiction. Notable examples from just the last few decades include the original Total Recall (story by Phillip K. Dick), Minority Report (ditto), The...
View ArticleDear David
Dear David, the latest film based on a viral Twitter thread, arrives way too late to have any relevance or connection to how the terminally online crowd can behave. The film centers on a handful of...
View ArticleDangerous Waters
Dangerous Waters falls short on the relatively straightforward basis of simple craft. In a lot of ways, Mark Jackson’s screenplay has a solid foundation for a thriller, including an appreciably...
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Rediscover: Chilly Scenes of Winter
Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979) is a romantic comedy that really isn’t romantic or funny. But that is likely the intention of director Joan Micklin Silver, who adapted Ann Beattie’s 1976 novel of the...
View ArticleStill Playin’ Possum: Music & Memories of George Jones
What would the Platonic ideal of a George Jones concert tribute film look like? It would not approach the spectacle of Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, nor would it brilliantly mete out the sheer cinematic...
View ArticleDivinity
Right from the pulsing black-and-white visuals of its opening, and the title credits’ kaleidoscopic flurry of lurid imagery, it’s clear that Divinity‘s ambitions are bold and boldly weird. Filtering...
View ArticleThe Delinquents
Morán (Brett Gelman lookalike Daniel Elías) works in a leadership role at a bank in Buenos Aires. From the minute we first see him, it’s clear he’s plotting something and it doesn’t take long to figure...
View ArticleOeuvre: Altman: Secret Honor
Upon first glance, Secret Honor is an outlier in Robert Altman’s career. The director is known and beloved for his sprawling casts, his quasi-realistic dialogue where characters speak over one another....
View ArticleKillers of the Flower Moon
Martin Scorsese has a secret weapon. It’s not his knack for framing shots, or the way his camera flows through a scene like a floating eye, or his longtime collaboration with editor Thelma Schoonmaker...
View ArticlePain Hustlers
From the start, it’s painfully clear that the filmmakers of Pain Hustlers want to approach the film’s story presuming that each of the audience members is a moralist. We are introduced to the film’s...
View ArticleThe Persian Version
It’s always easier to blame our problems on childhood trauma — or in this case, mommy issues. This is the revelation that a young Iranian-American woman comes to in Maryam Keshavarz’s The Persian...
View ArticleRevisit: Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Let’s get this out of the way: Woody Allen the man is a creep who deserves scorn and dismissal. But Woody Allen the filmmaker made reliably engaging movies for many years, and some of them reward...
View ArticleNyad
The long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad realized her lifelong dream when she swam continuously from Cuba to Florida. Her greatest strength, however, cannot be found in her muscles or lungs. It is her...
View ArticleButcher’s Crossing
Not even bald Nicolas Cage can save Butcher’s Crossing, a Western that has the strange problem of glossing over its story the moment it gets interesting. Perhaps director Gabe Polsky wanted to make a...
View ArticleSoul Mates
What if you took the movie, Saw, and turned it into a silly Valentine’s Day spin-off? You would end up with something like Soul Mates, a film that, despite its theatrical release, embodies the...
View ArticleFrom the Vaults of Streaming Hell: The Pope’s Exorcist
We have now reached the 50th anniversary of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, a film that was once a truly outré, dangerous piece of cultural ordnance, but is now just another franchise, putty to be...
View ArticleOeuvre: Altman: Fool for Love
It’s 1985 and Robert Altman is still deep in the creative and commercial wilderness of his, to be generous, mixed 1980s run. He’s five years removed from Popeye, a “disaster” of a film that wasn’t...
View ArticleFive Nights at Freddy’s
Can video game movies ever be considered high art? Granted, that’s a question likely few will think of while watching the new Five Nights at Freddy’s movie, adapted from the wildly popular video game...
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