Fresh Kills
Jennifer Esposito’s directorial debut, Fresh Kills follows the wives, daughters and sisters of the men who run an organized crime family. A Brooklyn native, Esposito gives us a different kind of Mafia...
View ArticleRide
The principle of “less is more” applies to many different disciplines and film is no exception. This piece of wisdom is something that writer and director Jake Allyn should have kept in mind for his...
View ArticleCriminally Underrated: Hoodwinked!
Reputation aside, when the National Film Registry added Shrek to the Library of Congress in 2020, it should hardly have come as a surprise. The 2001 animated film, which has since risen to...
View ArticleJust the Two of Us
When Blanche (Virginie Efira) first meets Grégoire (Melvil Poupaud), her world is full of color. The clothes she wears pop in vibrant bubblegum pinks, and the duo’s romantic trysts are always bathed in...
View ArticleKinds of Kindness
Kinds of Kindness is a film for those who proudly claim to have been a fan of writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos back in his Dogtooth and The Killing of a Sacred Deer psychological drama era. After the...
View ArticleThe Bikeriders
There’s a subgenre of early-‘60s girl group pop that centers on teenage delinquents and the ladies who love them. You know the type: guys wearing leather jackets and blue jeans, rolling packs of...
View ArticleOeuvre: Paul Thomas Anderson: Punch-Drunk Love
For anyone not paying attention to the film world in the early 2000s, it’s hard to express just how confounding it was when the first announcement of Paul Thomas Anderson’s follow-up film to Boogie...
View ArticleThelma
Between getting eviscerated by The Equalizer and pulverized by The Beekeeper, the 2020s have not been kind to cinema’s new favorite villain: the phishing scammer. A contemporary fusion of rich...
View ArticleRediscover: Humanoids of the Deep
The Godfather. Terminator 2. Taxi Driver. The Stuff. The Howling. An eclectic spectrum of film for sure, spanning decades and genres and budgets, but all bound by a singular fact: none would exist...
View ArticleFancy Dance
Fancy Dance, the narrative feature debut of director Erica Tremblay, revolves around an all too frequent occurrence in American society: the disappearance of a Native American woman. In recent times,...
View ArticleThe Exorcism
You should probably know The Exorcism is not a sequel to last year’s The Pope’s Exorcist. Both films star Russell Crowe, where he plays the role of a tortured priest. Since these films are not related,...
View ArticleHumanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person
Vampires have always been sexy. Even before Edward Cullen sparkled his way into every teenage girl’s heart, Dark Shadows’ Barnabas Collins collected a lot of fan mail. Kiefer Sutherland’s David in The...
View ArticleFrom the Vaults of Streaming Hell: Eaten Alive
In 1973, amid the blistering heat of the Texas summer, Tobe Hooper caught lightning in a bottle. With his breakthrough and masterpiece, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Hooper crafted a film rooted in...
View ArticleCopa 71
Not every story either deserves or needs a narrative dramatization in the form of a Hollywood or similarly budgeted adaptation, but here is a documentary, propulsive in both form and content, in which...
View ArticleJanet Planet
Janet Planet, the debut film from renowned playwright Annie Baker, seems to get off on how much it’s withholding from the audience. For a while, we don’t know the age of Lacy (Zoe Ziegler), our...
View ArticleA Quiet Place: Day One
Of the many alarming trends in modern blockbuster cinema, one of the most irksome is how studios hire indie filmmakers to make bland mainstream entertainments. Chloé Zhao made a Marvel movie, for...
View ArticleOeuvre: Paul Thomas Anderson: There Will Be Blood
Paul Thomas Anderson is a family man. Or rather, he’s the kind of man who can’t resist the temptation to explore every angle of some of the most dysfunctional families around. His first two films, Hard...
View ArticleLast Summer
One person’s irresistible obsession can look like madness to someone else, and the tension between these two points is what drives Catherine Breillat’s Last Summer. It’s a film that asks the viewer to...
View ArticleDaddio
One of the lesser-known impacts of rideshare apps on the taxicab business is that you’re now far less likely to have an immensely personal and revealing discussion about your life with Sean Penn....
View ArticleJune Zero
“An eye for an eye.” “Be the bigger person.” The right adage and approach to justice varies depending on the wrongdoing itself and the philosophy of those seeking retribution. In the legal justice...
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