Holy Hell! Walking and Talking Turns 20
When Nicole Holofcener wrote Walking and Talking, “Everyone passed on it.” As she wrote in an essay about the production, studios and independent companies dismissed her debut script as “soft” and “I...
View ArticleA Bigger Splash
Ralph Fiennes cavorting to a Rolling Stones record may be the pinnacle of cinematic delight. If nothing else, A Bigger Splash would be worth seeing if only for this spectacle and Fiennes’s manic...
View ArticleOeuvre: Wong Kar-wai: In the Mood for Love
It’s a meticulously recreated time-piece of the ’60s featuring stylish period sets, impeccable fashion, gorgeous stars and romantic longing. It may sound like “Mad Men,” but before that, it was Wong...
View ArticleCaptain America: Civil War
The Marvel war party presses on, overrunning the multiplexes this spring with Captain America: Civil War, a movie so stuffed to the gills with characters that naming it after Steve Rogers’ alter-ego is...
View ArticleRabin in His Own Words
Director Erez Laufer has executed a radical maneuver with his new documentary feature, Rabin in His Own Words. The film contains nothing written by Laufer; nearly all of the words in the work are...
View ArticleDheepan
Following the distinctive and structurally immaculate features A Prophet and Rust and Bone, French filmmaker Jacques Audiard returns with an uncharacteristically sloppy immigration drama. The...
View ArticleBeing Charlie
Being Charlie is an addict story, a rehab story, a coming-of-age story and a family drama in which none of the plots are fleshed out enough to make for a satisfying conclusion. The Rob Reiner film...
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Revisit: Breaker Morant
If Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957) is the general of all anti-war films, Bruce Beresford’s Breaker Morant (1980) is the colonel. Winner of 10 Australian Film Institute awards, Beresford’s film...
View ArticleDoukyuusei
Yaoi manga specifically focuses on romantic relationships between male characters. It is not, however, explicitly aimed at a gay male audience. Most readers—and writers—of yaoi are actually female. It...
View ArticleElstree 1976
Would you shell out your hard-earned cash for the autograph of someone who, decades ago, was close enough to touch the hem of Darth Vader’s cape? Perhaps not, but there’s plenty of people who happily...
View ArticleCode of Honor
Straight-to-video style action thrillers have a very low bar to clear for success. To function, the plot needs to be as simply drawn as the action is intricately choreographed. Deep, resonant...
View ArticleFrom the Vaults of Streaming Hell: Outcast
There’s something a little charming about these multinational film productions that have become du jour for the straight-to-video market. They’re thrown together like cinematic madlibs, built on a...
View ArticleOeuvre: Wong Kar-wai: 2046
Whether 2046 is a true sequel to In the Mood for Love—itself a follow-up of sorts to Days of Being Wild—or not, Wong Kar-Wai’s 2004 film has an intricately symbiotic relationship with its predecessor....
View ArticleLove & Friendship
Whit Stillman adapting Jane Austen feels as appropriate as it does redundant. His droll and talky comedies, fixed as they are on the manners, behaviors and energetic tête-à-têtes of their characters,...
View ArticleQueen Mimi
“Life is too much fun” is the mantra of Marie “Mimi” Haist, an 88-years young local icon of Santa Monica. She is touted as “Queen Mimi,” and the documentary of the same name, directed by Yaniv Rokah,...
View ArticleThe Lobster
In Yorgos Lanthimos’ English language debut, The Lobster, he presents to audiences a fully realized world, cut from whole cloth. There are science fiction elements on display, but it feels more like a...
View ArticleHigh-Rise
A few years back, after watching David Cronenberg’s caustic 1975 horror comedy Shivers, I remarked on how easily this elastic parable of sleek modern excess could adapt to a contemporary update. The...
View ArticleRevisit: The Wrong Man
The Wrong Man is perhaps Alfred Hitchcock’s strangest picture, in part because it is his least strange. The strained sexual pathologies of the auteur’s usual work is absent, and, in its place, even a...
View ArticleKill Zone 2
Kill Zone is a 2005 Hong Kong actioner most famous for an incredible alley fight scene and for showcasing the supreme talents of the in-demand Donnie Yen. While Kill Zone 2 is not a sequel in terms of...
View ArticleHoly Hell! Michael Turns 20
Twenty years ago, in the midst of the mid-’90s John Travoltaissance, Nora Ephron’s film Michael managed to gross more than $100 million at the box office. It’s not a particularly beloved film, nor has...
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