Oeuvre: Altman: The Company
Films about performance troupes and the artistic process typically begin on the level of character, allowing the audience to connect with one or two particular artists before gradually spiraling...
View ArticleDrive-Away Dolls
What if Bound sucked? That seemed to be the central goal in Ethan Coen’s directorial feature debut Drive-Away Dolls. With Joel moving in an artier direction with his first solo feature (2021’s The...
View ArticleIo Capitano
Directed with an expansive sense of scope by Matteo Garrone, Io Capitano tells an immigrant story on a massive scale. In a sense, its story is quite simple. He follows one young Senegalese immigrant...
View ArticleStopmotion
The uncanny medium of stop-motion animation provides fertile ground for grotesquerie. Look no further than Phil Tippett’s Mad God (2021) which plumbed the depths of visceral horror by breathing life...
View ArticleAbout Dry Grasses
Nuri Bilge Ceylan doesn’t care if you have to pee. One of the most unfortunate symptoms of Hollywood’s misguided fascination with bloated runtimes (a two-plu-hour MCU movie, for instance) is that...
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Revisit: Breathless
“After all, I am an asshole.” Is there a more apropos opening line in the history of cinema than this salvo from Jean-Luc Godard’s genre-busting debut film, Breathless? We hear Jean-Paul Belmondo’s...
View ArticleRed Right Hand
It only takes a moment to interpret the phrase “redneck revenge porn,” but if you want to extend the experience by an additional hour and fifty minutes, then Red Right Hand is the movie for you. But...
View ArticleCamp Pleasant Lake
Camp Pleasant Lake has got to be one of the most unpleasant horror films ever made. This is not a good thing, which is a shame since good horror often thrives on the disagreeable. Unfortunately for...
View ArticleHoly Hell! Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Turns 20
The best films are the ones that feel completely different every single time you watch them. This is going to be true of every film or piece of art you engage with, but the ones that stand out allow...
View ArticleOeuvre: Altman: A Prairie Home Companion
Though Robert Altman was in the process of developing a new movie when he died of leukemia in the fall of 2006, the 81-year-old auteur must have known A Prairie Home Companion, released just a few...
View ArticleDune: Part Two
Dune: Part Two is an improvement over Part One, a maximalist sci-fi epic with an impressive sense of scale. Director Denis Villeneuve uses his vast setting, the desert planet of Arrakis, to show the...
View ArticleAmelia’s Children
Amelia’s Children loads its one genuine idea into a single scene, which arrives predictably just as things ramp up for the third act, and otherwise, writer/director Gabriel Abrantes allows the rest of...
View ArticleOutlaw Posse
Outlaw Posse, the new Western from Mario Van Peebles, is so ineptly mounted it’s shocking. A vanity project to its core, it’s a revisionist film that unfolds like a violent after-school special rather...
View ArticleAsleep in My Palm
At the center of Asleep in My Palm lies an utterly fascinating dichotomy that has been simplified perhaps a shade too much in Henry Nelson’s debut feature. It exists between a father and his daughter,...
View ArticleRediscover: The Train
John Frankenheimer’s The Train opens in a darkened Parisian museum, a lone art enthusiast standing in hushed silence before a rich banquet of famous French masterpieces. That this man is not some...
View ArticlePitch People
Cinema is filled with salesmen. Willy Loman was never able to hack it going door-to-door, but Don Draper definitely could, if given the opportunity. Michael Scott may be socially inept, but if you need...
View ArticleCriminally Underrated: Birth
Birth opens with a self-proclaimed “man of science” speaking over a black screen, discussing his love for his wife as something that exists beyond logical explanation. What follows is an extended...
View ArticleKung Fu Panda 4
With notable exceptions, most movie series don’t usually plan on getting a fourth entry. The surprisingly decent Toy Story 4 came nine years after 3, which had played rather successfully as a finale...
View ArticleOeuvre: Fincher: Alien 3
Looking back at 1992’s Alien 3, one finds both a story of production woes and an early glimpse of the future for David Fincher. Looking to build upon the critical and popular success of Ridley Scott’s...
View ArticleSpace: The Longest Goodbye
Often lost in casual consideration of what it will take to send humans to Mars, a mission that is expected to occur within the next decade, is the psychological effect of such a long, isolating...
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