What You Wish For
Chefs are kind of having a moment in Hollywood right now. Name one person who hasn’t, after watching the first season of Hulu’s The Bear, enthusiastically—and maybe even a little suggestively—uttered...
View ArticleHandling the Undead
Have you ever wished you could talk to a departed loved one again? Handling the Undead, from Norwegian writer-director Thea Hvistendahl, quietly taps a universal sense of grief. Based on a novel by Let...
View ArticleCriminally Underrated: In the Cut
Disarticulate can mean to separate bones at the joints, either traumatically through injury or by a surgeon. But there is a second definition, perhaps more devastating to the protagonist of In the Cut,...
View ArticleThe Young Wife
The woman just wants to be with her man. That, above all else and beneath the pomp and the circumstance, is the crux of writer/director Tayarisha Poe’s sophomore effort. The filmmaker burst onto the...
View ArticleOeuvre: Paul Thomas Anderson: Boogie Nights
1997’s loveable Boogie Nights is heralded as Paul Thomas Anderson’s breakout film due in part to its mainstream critical success and culturally synonymous soundtrack, but especially because of its...
View ArticleThe Watchers
Mina (Dakota Fanning) is an artist with a troubled past living in Galway, an ocean away from her twin sister and the rash childhood decisions that haunt her. An ill-advised road trip sends her into a...
View ArticleKill Your Lover
There is something very wrong with Axel (Shane Quigley-Murphy). He’s come home from god knows where, and he isn’t feeling very well. His girlfriend, Dakota (Paige Gilmour), isn’t home alone, either....
View ArticleI Used to Be Funny
Two Phoebe Bridgers songs bookend I Used to Be Funny on a soundtrack that also includes tunes by Adrianne Lenker and MUNA, among others. While listeners of these songs can do their best to relate, they...
View ArticleThis Closeness
Kit Zauhar’s first film, Actual People (2021), was a semi-autobiographical hyper-naturalistic comedy of manners set during the last week of a philosophy student’s degree and very much indebted to...
View ArticleBanel & Adama
Love is a blindingly selfish emotion made all the more dangerous by the totality of its feeling. For the afflicted, it devours the attention, making everything else fade into irrelevance. Going about...
View ArticleRevisit: Last Action Hero
Despite directing three undeniable action-thriller classics (Predator, Die Hard and The Hunt for Red October) and offering a sterling filmography that includes blockbusters – such as Die Hard with a...
View ArticleLonging
Everyone grieves in their own way. Longing, Savi Gabizon’s English-language remake of his own 2017 Israeli film, is an unintentional test of our tolerance for that adage. It starts on a unique note of...
View ArticleFrom the Vaults of Streaming Hell: Starlight
Among Willie Nelson’s 152 and counting albums, there are naturally some clunkers. But even at his worse, starting with the three albums he made with crooner/golf pro Don Cherry and continuing through...
View ArticleHit Man
Since Dazed and Confused, Richard Linklater has been a scary judge of young talent. He helped jumpstart the early careers of Ben Affleck, Matthew McConaughey, Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy, Parker Posey and...
View ArticleTuesday
The first few scenes of Tuesday are a bit of an ordeal. A shadowy creature stalks a dying man as the whispers and shrieks of countless souls in agony echo and resound. One after another, we see the...
View ArticleOeuvre: Paul Thomas Anderson: Magnolia
If one follows the career of Paul Thomas Anderson closely, one can detect some kind of directorial or stylistic influence right on the surface of whatever the film is. If 1997’s Boogie Nights, with its...
View ArticleTreasure
Treasure is the kind of film that gets in its own way. The contours of its story are affecting, and yet the filmmakers do not trust their audience. They cannot see the difference between sad and...
View ArticleGhostlight
Community theater can be crude and goofy, characterized by amateur actors making do with little preparation and a slim budget. But there’s beauty as well in the form of a collective effort where...
View ArticleBad Behaviour
When we’ve lost a little part of ourselves, it’s difficult not to watch helplessly as the hole spreads outward to other aspects of our lives. The characters in writer/director/star Alice Englert’s...
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Revisit: Anatomy of a Fall
Truth is elusive in Anatomy of a Fall, a courtroom drama that takes a simple incident–one that happens offscreen in a matter of seconds–and wrings all the cinematic potential out of it. Not unlike the...
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