Cabrini
Cabrini, director Alejandro Gómez Monteverde’s hagiographic faux-epic about the titular Italian American saint, is the type of movie shown at religious summer camps when the counselors need a break...
View ArticleNight Shift
Although a comforting reinstallment of the motel horror sub-genre at first glance, Night Shift loses its charm in a series of various tropes that are strewn together with enough quick scares to deliver...
View ArticleAccidental Texan
The halfway point of Accidental Texan rather cleanly divides the film into two very different movies. Both are utterly cornball. Indeed, there is an appealing factor to just how thoroughly screenwriter...
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Revisit: Days of Heaven
For a few decades, Terrence Malick was the best living Impressionist filmmaker. From Badlands, his 1973 debut, through Tree of Life, the director’s 2011 magnum opus, Malick’s films felt like dreams...
View ArticleOne-Percent Warrior
High Risk, JCVD, One Cut of the Dead, Nightshooters, We Will Not Die Tonight: a rich vein of meta genre films about film crews thrust into deadly scenarios looms over the latest flurry of fists from...
View ArticleFrom the Vaults of Streaming Hell: Crush
The road to the wrought-iron gates of Streaming Hell is often paved with films that, while not bad, are only so-so. Since Netflix paid a handsome $12 million for Cary Koji Fukunaga’s Beasts of No...
View ArticleRicky Stanicky
There was a time when the Farrelly name was synonymous with humor so lowbrow it was practically subterranean. For three decades, Peter Farrelly and his brother, Bobby, churned out crude hit after crude...
View ArticleLove Lies Bleeding
With her first two features, British filmmaker Rose Glass has carved a niche for herself out of making portraits of lonely, isolated women. These characters find themselves in situations that squeeze...
View ArticleOeuvre: Fincher: Se7en
Apathy is the driving force in David Fincher’s detective thriller Se7en, as hero and villain alike lash out at this perceived blight on civilization. Retiring gumshoe William Somerset (Morgan Freeman)...
View ArticleThe Animal Kingdom
Humans are mysteriously transforming into beasts in Thomas Cailley’s French film The Animal Kingdom. Doctors are baffled about what is causing these mutations but claim that they are learning. That’s...
View ArticleOne Life
In a 2001 interview with The New York Times, Nicholas Winton, a British stockbroker who was compared to Oskar Schindler after playing a key role in organizing the evacuation of 669 mostly Jewish kids...
View ArticleState of Consciousness
Essentially every moment of State of Consciousness is devoted to making the viewer question the movie’s definition of reality. Screenwriters Guillaume Tunzini, Dikran Ornekian and Rylend Grant are...
View ArticleKnox Goes Away
Somehow, the “inside the mind of a contract killer/hitman” genre feels evergreen. Take a look at David Fincher’s The Killer from last year, which lets us peer into the life of an international assassin...
View ArticleRemembering Gene Wilder
It’s hard not to like Gene Wilder. The actor imbued every one of his performances with a remarkable charm that only the most talented can pull off repeatedly. He was funny but could also be ferocious....
View ArticleThe Shadowless Tower
Gu Wentong (Xin Baiqing) is a bit of a mess, and he doesn’t really care to fix that. He’s been divorced for two years and still hasn’t told his friends (who he only sees every so often anyway); his...
View ArticleRevisit: Deep Impact
It seems impossible to discuss Deep Impact without also addressing the other major release from 1998 about a massive asteroid barreling toward Earth and the handful of people sent to prevent its...
View ArticleHoly Hell! Spartan Turns 20
Directed with lean efficiency by David Mamet, Spartan is the most cynical thriller of the post-9/11 era. In the wake of the attack, many films eschewed nationalism and instead considered America’s role...
View ArticleRyuichi Sakamoto: Opus
Writing about a documentary like Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus is tricky because, for one, it’s not exactly much of a movie – at least not in the traditional sense. Directed by Neo Sora, the subject’s own...
View ArticleProblemista
Brimming with an eccentric playfulness, yet able to navigate the sometimes-trivial experience of being a twentysomething, Julio Torres’ Problemista captures the essence of a generation in his...
View ArticleOeuvre: Fincher: The Game
The David Fincher we know today has a distinct style, pronounced enough that his latest film, The Killer, has been interpreted as a self-reflexive parody of his own cold and methodical filmmaking...
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