Miller’s Girl
Miller’s Girl is bolstered, but not exactly strengthened, by its pair of central performances and improved, but not provided any real depth, by its ear for frank dialogue. It’s yet another in a long...
View ArticleOeuvre: Altman: The Gingerbread Man
Some of the best directors in film history have worked on John Grisham adaptations. Grisham, a novelist who specializes in legal thrillers and whose work could be found in airports everywhere...
View ArticleSometimes I Think About Dying
Fran is the quiet woman at the office. She shows up on time, works on her spreadsheets and puts in cursory appearances for team meetings and celebrations. But as soon as she can grab a plate of cake,...
View ArticleTótem
When did you first realize that someday, your parents are going to die? That you will also die? When we are children, the future remains impossibly open. The days stretch on, the skies burn with blue...
View ArticleThe Seeding
Domesticity is a prison in writer-director Barnaby Clay’s narrative feature debut, The Seeding. Both physically and mentally so, it turns out, for our grating and deeply unlikable protagonist, Wyndham...
View ArticleRediscover: Mad God
Three decades in the making, Phil Tippett’s Mad God depicts a descent into a hellish underworld akin to a stop-motion version of the animation from Pink Floyd: The Wall crossed with the most surrealist...
View ArticleAmerican Star
Given how few of them probably exist, it is astonishing that the professional assassin gets so much screen time. Early films like Assassin for Hire and Le Samourai helped create the myth of the...
View ArticleFrom The Vaults of Streaming Hell: Winslow the Christmas Bear
Picture this: It’s Christmas Eve, and a cold one. Your family vacations for the holidays in a rustic cabin that borders on the snowy mountain wilderness, so you’ve decided to venture out for a solitary...
View ArticleJunction
Writer/director Bryan Greenberg clearly has noble intentions with Junction, which wants to be a sprawling ensemble drama about the opioid crisis plaguing America’s pharmaceutical industry. At the top,...
View ArticleOeuvre: Altman: Cookie’s Fortune
Most of the time, when a brutal suicide is central to a film’s premise, you’d expect the plot to cover the emotional fallout around the death. The person’s family gathers, spends time grieving and...
View ArticleArgylle
Early in director Matthew Vaughn’s abysmal new spy adventure, Argylle, an attendee at a book release Q&A for the new spy novel by Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard) asks her if she’s a spy. As he...
View ArticleHow to Have Sex
Like any group of enthusiastic youngsters heading out on the ostensible “holiday of a lifetime,” it’s obvious that the heroines of How to Have Sex are not destined to have a good time on their trip. In...
View ArticleThe Promised Land
Mads Mikkelsen is that rare blend of leading man and character actor. Like Willem Dafoe, he is comfortable playing bad guys and weirdos but can also gracefully slip into the role of the main...
View ArticleScrambled
The Bechdel Test was created to measure the way women are depicted in film. It first appeared in Alison Bechdel’s comic Dykes to Watch Out For, and for a film to pass the test, the movie has to have at...
View ArticleSkin Deep
Skin Deep delves into a fantastical exploration of what it describes as the fragile construct of the “so-called” self. Based on a conceit where people at a therapeutic island commune are given the...
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Revisit: The Rules of the Game
The maxim that has long been said about Citizen Kane can also be applied to Jean Renoir’s 1939 film The Rules of the Game: it’s a classic film that is not only good for you, but also enjoyable to...
View ArticleShe Is Conann
She Is Conann presents the viewer with a diabolical choice: eat a plate of expired meats and descend into a hallucinatory nightmare of blood and terror, or watch this movie. Either way, the experience...
View ArticleHoly Hell! Born to Fight Turns 20
When Tony Jaa’s elbows collided with pulverizing force onto a combatant’s skull in Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior (2003), he might as well have been delivering a blow to early-‘00s action itself. Suddenly,...
View ArticleDisco Boy
An ambling sort of character study (twice over), Disco Boy does deserve some credit for not going in any direction one might guess from that semi-evasive title. No, this is not a coming-of-age story...
View ArticleOeuvre: Altman: Dr. T and the Women
It wouldn’t be unfair to say that the long and storied career of Robert Altman was more of a “fade away” action, rather than a “burning out.” Here at the beginning of the end of the new millennium,...
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