Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
For a film in which not a lot happens on the surface, there sure is plenty going on in Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. While the main storyline goes around in circles on the streets...
View ArticleRevisit: The Station Agent
Stumbling upon The Station Agent feels like going through an old photo album. Overtly (through style and setting) and implicitly (through the emotion you feel while watching), the film evokes a sense...
View ArticleLate Night with the Devil
Demonic possession isn’t as compelling as it used to be. In the half-century since The Exorcist (1973) reportedly prompted theater audiences to faint, vomit or suffer panic attacks and medical...
View ArticleFemme
Femme has a lot of nerve. It opens with a hate crime, coldly and brutally carried out against the protagonist, whose personality until this point has been that of a person who calls it like he sees it....
View ArticleCriminally Underrated: God’s Not Dead
Before we begin to talk about Harold Cronk’s seminal Christian drama God’s Not Dead, one thing has to be made clear: though the Criminally Underrated banner generally operates as a way of championing...
View ArticleLimbo
Limbo is one of those movies where the people reflect the landscape. Or vice versa. Set in the dusty Australian outback, Ivan Sen’s new film follows police detective Travis Hurley (Simon Baker) as he...
View ArticleDogMan
It’s rather impressive how thoroughly writer/director Luc Besson flubs handling the obvious potential of an insane premise in DogMan, a sort-of thriller that is kind of about revenge if you squint at...
View ArticleOeuvre: Fincher: Fight Club
In the quarter of a century since its theatrical release, David Fincher’s Fight Club has gone from box office bomb to cult classic to the brightest of red flags whenever it’s featured on someone’s...
View ArticleLousy Carter
Bob Byington unceremoniously walks us through the months leading up to a professor’s death in his latest cynical feature, Lousy Carter. While it features an ensemble of lovable nerds fit for a classic...
View ArticleWicked Little Letters
Just because something happened, doesn’t mean it’s worth making a movie about. In the case of Thea Sharrock’s British comedy Wicked Little Letters, it’s up for debate whether this particular true story...
View ArticleRediscover: Mermaid Legend
The best revenge stories carry within themselves an intrinsic sense of the supernatural or the mystic. Some of the subgenre’s most classic examples, such The Crow or Oldboy, position “revenge” as an...
View ArticleThe Listener
Steve Buscemi is better known as an actor than director, and yet there is an intriguing throughline in his work behind the camera. Starting with his debut Trees Lounge, Buscemi has made films about...
View ArticleLa Chimera
Archeology is not always a noble pursuit, nor does the hunt for knowledge continually supersede the need to satiate one’s ego. Indiana Jones has danced around this notion for decades, fighting almost...
View ArticleAsphalt City
If Nic Pizzolatto tried to remake and “improve” the Martin Scorsese film Bringing Out the Dead, it would probably look a lot like Asphalt City. Pizzolatto, the humorless creator of the True Detective...
View ArticleFrom the Vaults of Streaming Hell: Dangerous Lies
Dangerous Lies exemplifies what’s been wrong with much of Netflix’s original content over the past decade. Both boring and nonsensical, the film feels like its sole purpose is to simply fill space in...
View ArticleThe Wages of Fear
Remakes get a bad rap. From Scarface to The Blob, more than a few classics and beloved genre flicks triumph as reimaginings of other classics. Others stand as potent time capsules of a cinematic era,...
View ArticleOeuvre: Fincher: Panic Room
Across a dozen features, David Fincher has cultivated one of the most cohesive modern oeuvres, delineating and exploring a world whose free-flowing cruelty channels directly into his protagonists’...
View ArticleMonkey Man
About 20 minutes into Monkey Man, our protagonist, Kid (Dev Patel), asks a very powerful person for a job. She scoffs, telling him that she needs a resume and a CV to even entertain his request. Kid...
View ArticleThe Beast
At a decisive moment in Celine Song’s Oscar-nominated Past Lives, Teo Yoo’s Hae Sung asks Greta Lee’s Nora a puzzling question: “What if this is a past life as well, and we are already something else...
View ArticleRediscover: Spree
In light of Joe Keery’s recent rise to mainstream indie success with his solo project Djo having released the ever-viral “End of Beginning” which continues to dominate the TikTok music space, it feels...
View Article