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Rediscover: Eric Rohmer’s Tales of Four Seasons: A Tale of Summer
Eric Rohmer’s 1996 film A Tale of Summer begins much the same way that the director’s 1983 holiday film Pauline at the Beach did. We see Gaspard (Melvil Poupaud) arriving in Dinard, a town on the...
View ArticleIn Our Day
On its surface, filmmaker Hong Sang-soo’s work may seem trivial. Characters captured with zoom and two shots chat about mundane topics and casually stroll through the city, often stopping just to drink...
View ArticleComa
French director Bertrand Bonello had an arthouse breakout this year with The Beast, an extended science fiction riff on Last Year at Marienbad loosely based on a Henry James short story. The Nocturama...
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Rediscover: Eric Rohmer’s Tales of Four Seasons: A Tale of Autumn
As far back as the 1930s and ‘40s, romantic comedies have enjoyed a popular and long-lasting relevance in mainstream cinema, even in the face of occasional critical dismissal. Teasing a relationship...
View ArticleFrom the Vaults of Streaming Hell: Hell House LLC Origins: The Carmichael Manor
Is the title Hell House LLC not clunky enough for you? Good news, because that surprisingly effective 2015 found footage horror film overcame its decidedly unscary name – giving off some Monsters, Inc....
View ArticleTaking Venice
Taking Venice keeps trying to figure out why it needs to tell us its story. A residual emptiness follows each of the developments in director Amei Wallach’s documentary, in which a potentially...
View ArticleOeuvre: Fincher: The Killer
David Fincher’s 12th and most recent feature film, The Killer, may not be the culmination of his career as a major Hollywood film director—depending on your personal preference, that distinction would...
View ArticleThe Garfield Movie
Garfield, like Shrek, is more than just a cartoon character. He’s a cultural phenom, one whose memetic status looms larger and more significant than his originating work. Even someone who hasn’t ever...
View ArticleFuriosa: A Mad Max Saga
It’s difficult to believe it’s been nine years since George Miller unleashed Mad Max: Fury Road onto the world. Decades in the making, Fury Road was a glorious return to form for the madcap Australian,...
View ArticleRediscover: Driftwood
With a young Natalie Wood singing from the Anthology of American Folk Music, calling out “Beelzebub” in a feverish delirium and a dog on trial, Allan Dwan’s curious 1947 drama Driftwood has enough plot...
View ArticleSongs of Earth
Director Margreth Olin presents quite a curious and appropriate pairing of subjects in Songs of Earth. In this contemplative documentary, the filmmaker visits her parents at her isolated childhood home...
View ArticleLilies
In Hamlet, the title character seeks to expose his uncle’s guilt by arranging for him to witness a theatrical performance designed to catch the conscience of the King. Shakespeare was onto something,...
View ArticleFrom the Vaults of Streaming Hell: The Great Chinese Beans
Perhaps more than in any other genre, the subjectivity of comedy makes it difficult to fully judge a singular work by any metric of criticism other than personal taste. The experiential bias inherent...
View ArticleSolo
“We are who we pretend to be,” said Kurt Vonnegut, a phrase that threatens to come across as a truism but might act as an effective thesis for a film about how we find ourselves in our performances....
View ArticleIn A Violent Nature
For a subgenre as deceptively straightforward and formula driven as the slasher, time has proven it to be a tenaciously versatile style of horror. The elements of killer, victims and kills offer a...
View ArticleEzra
Philip Larkin wrote, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad/ They may not mean to, but they do/ They fill you with the faults they had/ And add some extra, just for you.” For anyone with a strained...
View ArticleRobot Dreams
The hand-drawn animated film Robot Dreams wants to be charming so badly. Director and writer Pablo Berger deploys a style that is deceptively simple and yet allows him to fill the frame with many cute...
View ArticleOeuvre: Paul Thomas Anderson: Hard Eight
Paul Thomas Anderson’s enduring career has been marked by critical success and frequent collaboration with the likes of John C. Reilly, Philip Baker Hall and Philip Seymour Hoffman. But in the...
View ArticleThe Dead Don’t Hurt
The Dead Don’t Hurt begins with two images atypical of a Western – a knight in shining armor riding on horseback and an extended shot of a sick woman on her deathbed. Both are quiet, lack dialogue and...
View ArticleRediscover: Keoma
Where the classical Hollywood western offered filmmakers the opportunity to erect, confront or deconstruct the myths about the creation of the American West, spaghetti westerns function as their...
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