The People’s Joker
Have you ever watched a movie that felt like it was so specific to your tastes and lived experiences, that you start growing concerned that your thoughts and emotions were harvested to make the film?...
View ArticleParachute
“You’re the most self-aware inexperienced person I’ve ever met.” So says the eventual love interest to our protagonist soon into their first outing together in co-writer/director Brittany Snow’s...
View ArticleHoly Hell! The Edukators Turns 20
The middle years of the somehow two-term Bush presidency were a peak moment for politically engaged cinema. There are many reasons for this. The Boomers, who had burned draft cards, dropped acid at...
View ArticleThe Old Oak
Ken Loach may not have a unique formal style to his films, and yet his persistent voice makes him distinct. For half a century, Loach has had deep compassion for the working class and his films have...
View ArticleOeuvre: Fincher: Zodiac
When David Fincher was a child growing up in the Bay Area — specifically in Marin County, due north across the Golden Gate’s majestic span – his parents briefly fretted about him riding the bus to...
View ArticleCivil War
We keep hearing it from political pundits on the news: our nation is more divided than ever. Left and right are far apart. A second Civil War is on the horizon. And what would it look like if Americans...
View ArticleSting
In Sting, unlike the arachnid creature-feature classic Arachnophobia, it doesn’t pay to bring a nail gun to a spider fight. Unlucky exterminator Frank (Jermaine Fowler) discovers the hard way, and as a...
View ArticleArcadian
As a film, Arcadian is fairly familiar and predictable in its particular subset of the wide-ranging horror genre in that it pits a desperate family against an alien threat. The broad appeal of this...
View ArticleLaRoy, Texas
A lot of bad behavior goes on in rural America, although the eponymous town in LaRoy, Texas might host more than the usual share of adulterers, assassins, blackmailers and con artists. Our first...
View ArticleSasquatch Sunset
Famously, no evidence exists – at least currently – to prove the existence of Bigfoot. If it did, it might look something like Sasquatch Sunset. Directed by brotherly duo Nathan and David Zellner...
View ArticleLost Angel: The Genius of Judee Sill
In 1963, Judee Sill was doing time in reform school for an armed robbery committed when she was 18. Five years later, in the middle of another stint for fraud and prostitution, she decided to follow a...
View ArticleSweet Dreams
Those familiar with the structure of the Jackass franchise will recognize the genuine camaraderie that comes with committing acts of sadomasochism with your closest friends, and Lije Sarki’s Sweet...
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Revisit: The Red Balloon
The Red Balloon has delighted audiences – adults and children both – since its 1956 debut. The nearly wordless film packs a lot into its 34-minute runtime. In an elegant evocation of childhood,...
View ArticleIrena’s Vow
Irena’s Vow is about a minor episode from World War II where someone courageously hid Jews away from Nazis. Stories like this are almost as old as films about the war itself, and yet this film is...
View ArticleCriminally Underrated: The Nun
It was only a few weeks ago that theaters received their second “young American woman seeking to become a nun arrives in a sinister Italian convent” movie within a month, as if to further hammer home...
View ArticleOeuvre: Fincher: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
In the shadow of a most peculiar clock, when the world was at war the first time around, a man was born under unusual circumstances. True, he lived and experienced and suffered and celebrated like the...
View ArticleThe Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare
There’s a scene midway through Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds that, if you’re reading this, you probably already know: the Basterds, while sitting in a Nazi tavern, attempt to fool those same...
View ArticleAbigail
In as much as Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett are concerned, there’s nothing much better than placing a bunch of people into a house and then watching them get killed off one by one. It’s a...
View ArticleBlood for Dust
We open with a scene that is rather jarring, intentionally vague, and, ultimately, quite haunting in the way it says so much with simple things like a gunshot and a spatter of blood. In the next scene,...
View ArticleStress Positions
Set almost entirely in a multi-unit Brooklyn brownstone, the edgy comedy Stress Positions assumes that acknowledgment is enough. It is easy to see some of ourselves in the characters, quasi-articulate...
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