Coup!
Set amid the 1918 influenza, Coup! quite obviously parallels a certain more recent pandemic while also offering enough of a cultural remove to make this film more than merely a COVID commentary. In...
View ArticleSebastian
Oh, the troubled life of the writer. What profession has been romanticized as much as it? Girls’ Hannah Horvath let us in on the millennial angst of being a (comfortably) starving young artist living...
View ArticleRediscover: Searching for Bobby Fischer
Before The Queen’s Gambit, there was Searching for Bobby Fischer. Based on the real-life story of child chess prodigy Josh Waitzkin, the film tells a fictionalized tale about the seven-year-old’s...
View ArticlePeak Season
For film buffs, it can be easy to get swept up looking for the next best thing in cinema that we forget movies don’t necessarily have to do anything groundbreaking to still be phenomenal pieces of...
View ArticleDark Feathers: Dance of the Geisha
“What if a ballroom-dancing samurai serial killer?” It’s an audacious concept, and in her feature debut, the psychological thriller Dark Feathers: Dance of the Geisha, writer-director-producer Crystal...
View ArticleOeuvre: Spielberg: Duel
The male ego is the primary force in Duel. Not just the ego of the deranged truck driver, one whose face we never see. A hapless traveling salesman cannot help but sate his ego when he first encounters...
View ArticleCuckoo
Setting a story around a vacation has long provided an obvious way to subvert expectations. Comedies use the contrast between the desire for relaxation and the comedic chaos that follows to evoke...
View ArticleIt Ends with Us
If you’ve visited a Barnes & Noble, or any chain bookseller, recently, you may have noticed the conspicuous advancement of the romance section. Once a sequestered, parallel universe of cheap...
View ArticleRunning on Empty
In the alternate present or near-distant future of Running on Empty, scientists have discovered a method of determining almost precisely how many days remain until a person dies. This is, obviously, a...
View ArticleGood One
Writer and director India Donaldson (daughter of the filmmaker Roger Donaldson) develops a lived-in sense of authenticity with her three leads in Good One. Like a great short story, the movie sharply...
View ArticleGirl You Know It’s True
Girl, you know the story of Milli Vanilli, the manufactured ‘90s pop duo infamously caught with someone else’s voice boxes in the cookie jar. Theirs is an oft-told tale of music industry exploitation,...
View ArticleSugarcane
How do you make a nonfiction film when you must broach a deeply painful, buried topic? That tension is central to Sugarcane, a film about the Canadian Indian residential school system. For decades, the...
View ArticleTwilight of the Warriors: Walled In
Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In amounts to not a whole lot more than a turf war that explodes after a period of dormancy and a colossal misunderstanding involving a bag of drugs, which director Soi...
View ArticleDance First
There are several contexts in which cynicism feels appropriate, and a biopic concerning 20th-century author and playwright Samuel Beckett certainly falls in that category. However, cynicism is only...
View ArticleHoly Hell! Spider-Man 2 Turns 20
When Spider-Man 2 swung into theaters in 2004, comic book films were, remarkably in retrospect, still a bit of a gamble. Sure, there had been big successes – Superman and Batman made their marks in ’78...
View ArticleOeuvre: Spielberg: The Sugarland Express
The first thing that stands out about Steven Spielberg’s The Sugarland Express is how noisy it is. Frame by crowded frame, a sea of automobiles swarms the Panavision camera, creating dense tableaus of...
View ArticleAlien: Romulus
What is the difference between respecting fans and coddling them? Why are some meta-references clever, and others obvious? If you don’t know the answers to these questions, you will after you see...
View ArticleSkincare
The worldwide skincare market is a billion-dollar industry that relies on our consumerist desires to keep up with the trends just as much as it depends on a product’s ability to give you that...
View ArticleClose to You
“I’ve missed you,” says a mother to her son early in Close to You, “and seeing you now just makes me miss you more.” It’s obvious what Miriam (Wendy Crewson) consciously means by this statement, and...
View ArticleMy Penguin Friend
For animal lovers, watching the barrage of animal-centric movies that come out every year can feel like playing a game of Russian roulette with your emotions. Lovers of the site Does the Dog Die? know...
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