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Revisit: To Die For
Getting on television was the American Dream of the back half of the 20th century. There was just something gratifying about the idea of your image beaming into millions of households, whether you were...
View ArticleMountains
When it comes to independent dramas, it’s easy to become disillusioned through familiarity: what once seemed naturalist can come off as contrived, what once felt fresh now feels derivative. For most...
View ArticleThe Greatest Surf Movie in the Universe
Ten years from now, a virus has wiped out a considerable portion of the Earth’s population — not just humans but all beings that sustain life. After this colossal devastation, a scientist developed a...
View ArticleStrange Darling
If this review mirrored the structure of Strange Darling, this would be the third paragraph, and we’d already be deep into the meat with an obviously bloodthirsty maniac working hard to murder a woman...
View ArticleOeuvre: Spielberg: Jaws
When 2017’s The Shape of Water won the Academy Award for Best Picture, people were quick to label it fantasy, romance, drama—basically anything but horror. But the fact of the matter is that Guillermo...
View ArticleConsumed
An unimpressive monster is usually the death knell for a creature feature, and the amorphous predator at the center of Mitchell Altieri’s Consumed doesn’t do the movie any favors. Still, thanks in part...
View ArticleGreedy People
Greedy People is a callback to the crime thrillers popular in the mid-nineties, however, this film does not reach the heights of Pulp Fiction or Out of Sight. Instead, it is reminiscent of the...
View ArticleBetween the Temples
Using grief for comedic purposes requires a deft touch. While director Nathan Silver, who cowrote the script with C. Mason Wells, is more than up to the task in dramedy Between the Temples, the natural...
View ArticleHostile Dimensions
Hostile Dimensions, the newest film by Scottish writer-director Graham Hughes, isn’t all that good — and saying that feels pretty bad. People like to imagine negative reviews being written by gleeful,...
View ArticlePlace of Bones
Director Audrey Cummings’s Place of Bones does not begin with much promise. The actors seem a bit stilted, as if either too much or too little rehearsing led to exaggerated enunciation of fairly...
View ArticleClose Your Eyes
Close Your Eyes is the kind of movie you hope lives up to its lore. The film is an epic of sorts from Víctor Erice, the Spanish filmmaker who delivered one of the most celebrated arthouse film debuts...
View ArticleI’ll Be Your Mirror
There’s nothing wrong with a film being a meditation on its subject–in this case, grief and renewal–but, like any meditation, there’s a risk of falling asleep. I’ll Be Your Mirror narrowly avoids...
View ArticleThe Becomers
The paranoia of aliens among us has been a popular theme in films, often presented in response to looming political and environmental threats. It’s also shown up during eras when the pressure to...
View ArticleRevisit: A Civil Action
There’s something about the dramatization of historical events that gives a film an extra layer of satisfaction. Perhaps the fact that the events unfolding actually happened lends more gravity to the...
View ArticleThe Other Laurens
Claude Schmitz’s Belgian-French thriller The Other Laurens opens like an archetypal ghost story of two men recounting a supernatural sighting. The unreliability of one character’s account and the...
View ArticleParadise Is Burning
In slice-of-life films, half the battle is capturing a realistic setting and populating an often moderately financed project with actors who can bring presence and verisimilitude to the table. Success...
View ArticleHoly Hell! Garden State Turns 20
If you were a young teen in 2004 who was prone to overdramatic bouts of ennui and the overwhelming desire to get the hell out of dodge, then odds are Zach Braff’s Garden State played a pretty...
View ArticleReagan
In the comparatively brief history of the United States, there are few presidents more highly lauded – or widely derided, in many circles – than Ronald Reagan. The 40th president of the United States,...
View ArticleOeuvre: Spielberg: Close Encounters of the Third Kind
When an interviewer pressed Steven Spielberg on how Close Encounters of the Third Kind unites the respective passions of his parents—his mother’s love of music and his father’s zeal for computer...
View Article1992
Inherent right from the title, 1992 certainly has large ambitions. Director Ariel Vromen’s latest film aims to be both a gritty crime story and a charged social-political drama, combining heist thrills...
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