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Revisit: Mean Streets
Revisiting any established director’s early work tends to be illuminating, the crude outlines of early style helping to clarify ideas and concepts that will come into clearer focus with more...
View ArticleMenus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros
When Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros was first announced in 2022, it was called A Family Business, a title that perhaps contained a double meaning, alluding to both the Troisgros family’s restaurant, La...
View ArticleCriminally Underrated: Coherence
For a film where very little happens in front of the camera, Coherence casts quite a spell. Filmed on a micro-budget of $50,000, James Ward Byrkit’s 2014 thriller manages to tease a galaxy-spanning...
View ArticleBillion Dollar Babies: The True Story of the Cabbage Patch Kids
When you think of Black Friday, you think of riotous crowds. Wide-eyed consumers dashing through big box stores to grab severely discounted 65” flat-screens off pallets is the behavior expected from...
View ArticleEileen
It can be disarming to watch a film unfold, cognizant of a sharp left turn lingering just around the corner but having no idea what form it will take. Infamously jarring tonal and thematic shifts, such...
View ArticleOeuvre: Altman: The Player
Talk about a comeback. Coming off nearly a decade of critical and/or financial failures, following the disastrous production of Popeye in 1980, the once-lauded Robert Altman was in need of a project to...
View ArticleRise of the Footsoldier: Vengeance
Six movies deep and well into a series’ gone-direct-to-video phase, odds are that the results are likely either severely lacking in quality or a passionate effort by some up-and-coming genre director...
View ArticleThe Sweet East
The ethos of The Sweet East, the directorial debut of cinematographer Sean Price Williams, can be traced to the 2010s post-mumblecore corner of New York indie cinema occupied by Alex Ross Perry and the...
View ArticleIn Water
The first thing viewers will notice about director Hong Sang-soo’s latest film In Water is the blur. Nearly every shot is out of focus in this short-but-sweet tale about an aspiring film director,...
View ArticleTeddy’s Christmas
The Christmas season is about generosity, of course. But it’s become impossible to separate giving from receiving, and as far as that goes, even the best of us is tempted to get greedy with Santa. The...
View ArticleRevisit: Gone Girl
“I swear, you two are the most fucked-up people I’ve ever known . . . and I specialize in fucked up.” So says celebrity lawyer Tanner Bolt brought to vibrant life by Tyler Perry in David Fincher’s 2014...
View ArticlePianoforte
In many ways growth is acknowledging both the fear of failure and the acceptance of it. We spend our youth battling the anxiety that is the unknown, and yet there is comfort in letting go of what we...
View ArticleLa Syndicaliste
La Syndicaliste tries to be two films at once. On one hand, it is about corruption in Europe, or how politicians and businessmen line each other’s pockets. The other film, the more extraordinary one,...
View ArticleLord of Misrule
Lord of Misrule brims with familiar folk horror trappings. Creepy, motionless kids in animal masks? Check. Ominous handwoven totems dangling from trees? Oh yeah. Melodic chants with sinister...
View ArticleConcrete Utopia
In 2019, Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite opened the eyes of mainstream American audiences to Korean films. Taking home a slew of honors at the Academy Awards and finding both critical and mass acclaim,...
View ArticleCriminally Underrated: The Pelican Brief
Leave the World Behind, the latest, disappointingly under-the-radar directorial effort of Mr. Robot and Homecoming mastermind Sam Esmail, premieres on Netflix on Dec. 8. It features a catalog of famous...
View ArticleOrigin
Origin, the new film by Ava DuVernay, is an adaptation of the nonfiction book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson. It is not a straightforward adaptation, a documentary that...
View ArticleOeuvre: Altman: Short Cuts
“I don’t know if I can pull this off.” So said Robert Altman to associate producer Mike Kaplan in the thick of filming his 1993 humanist epic Short Cuts. “I’m exhausted,” he sighed, while climbing into...
View ArticlePoor Things
Dystopian, strange yet distinctly human stories are what we’ve come to expect from Yorgos Lanthimos in recent years. With 2017’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer, the director delivered a chilling...
View ArticleThe Boy and the Heron
The Boy and the Heron’s Japanese title translates to How Do You Live?, a phrase that describes the themes of Hayao Miyazaki’s film more accurately and shares a name with a 1937 novel by Genzaburō...
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