Oeuvre: Soderbergh: Kafka
After taking the film world by storm with Sex, Lies and Videotape, Steven Soderbergh flexed his creative muscles, showing off the versatility that would typify the rest of his career. Kafka remains an...
View ArticleCentral Intelligence
So many modern comedies seem hell-bent on forcing irritating misanthropes onto the viewer, operating under the delusion that a higher concentration of assholes correlates with realism. Films like this...
View ArticleFinding Dory
It’s become increasingly necessary to manage expectations before walking into a new Pixar feature. At this point, the studio that once could do no wrong has faltered as regularly as it’s soared. A...
View ArticleThe Department Q Trilogy
The Danish Department Q trilogy consists of standalone films—The Keeper of Lost Causes, The Absent One and A Conspiracy of Faith—that nevertheless work best when viewed in proper sequence and as a...
View ArticleTickled
The timing of David Farrier and Dylan Reeve’s disturbing investigation into the world of Competitive Endurance Tickling is uncanny. Plot points include a judge handing down a shockingly light sentence...
View ArticleMy Love, Don’t Cross That River
My Love, Don’t Cross That River paints an emotional portrait as devastating as life itself. Over a 15-month period, and in South Korea’s largest independent film endeavor, director Jin Mo-young...
View ArticleRaiders! The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made
The best documentaries about movie making all share the same focus on obsessive passion. The singular drive necessary to transform the kernel of an idea into a feature length film requires at least a...
View ArticleRevisit: Homicide
Homicide is David Mamet’s best film by a significant margin. None of Mamet’s other films are as resonant or as personal, as layered or enigmatic, as this idiosyncratic police procedural from 1991. What...
View ArticleBang Gang (A Modern Love Story)
Teen characters having sex in film is hardly shocking. Not even the title of Eva Husson’s directorial debut, Bang Gang (A Modern Love Story), is as titillating as it was surely meant to be after years...
View ArticleNuts!
Any documentary that opens on an animated sequence of two goats having sex and prompting a man to muse, “Too bad I don’t have billy goat nuts…” is a special one, indeed. Nuts! director Penny Lane...
View ArticleFree State of Jones
There’s a sequence that repeats throughout The Free State of Jones no less than four times. A supporting character barely fleshed out beyond their relationship to Newton Knight, the bedraggled rebel...
View ArticleOeuvre: Soderbergh: King of the Hill
Early in his career Steven Soderbergh already bucked expectations. He followed up his lively, ultra-cool debut sex, lies, and videotape (1989) with a curveball in the morose Kafka (1991), which was...
View ArticleThe Neon Demon
In Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon, beauty is an infectious disease everyone wants to fall ill from. Here, the stylish director weaponizes his personal affinity for aesthetics. Wrapping society’s...
View ArticleRediscover: Los Muertos
“I have little faith in words.” -Lisandro Alonso Lisandro Alonso’s 2004 drama Los Muertos demands your attention without necessarily commanding it. There’s a difference. Los Muertos is leisurely and...
View ArticleWiener-Dog
It’s a miracle that Todd Solondz can still get movies made. He hasn’t made anything close to a hit since Happiness was nominated for a Golden Globe Award in 1999, and despite his first-rate ability to...
View ArticleIntruder
There can be great joy in watching bad movies, and that joy is overflowing from director Travis Z’s new woman-in-peril thriller. Intruder allows us to watch a tale unfold unencumbered by narrative...
View ArticleRight Now, Wrong Then
With each new movie from Hong Sang-Soo comes the possibility, however slight, that the minutely-focused Korean craftsman is going to finally drop the ball, finally lose the fine balance of replication...
View ArticleHoly Hell! The Cable Guy Turns 20
It’s difficult to ignore $20 million. Just ask the bewildered moviegoers who first caught glimpse of The Cable Guy (1996), the Jim Carrey comedy that was in the headlines before it even hit the screen....
View ArticleThe BFG
Shortly into The BFG, the latest failed adaptation of a Roald Dahl classic, a spindly behemoth whisks a young girl from a London orphanage to a faraway northern land. The kidnapping is breathtakingly...
View ArticleOeuvre: Soderbergh: The Underneath
Before crafting stylish thrillers like Out of Sight and The Limey, Steven Soderbergh dipped his toe into the film noir pool with The Underneath, a fascinating remake of the Burt Lancaster starring...
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