The Legend of Tarzan
The current cinematic marketplace being built around rehashing pre-existing properties is depressing, but it’s still possible for exciting pieces of entertainment to be birthed in this environment. The...
View ArticleThe Purge: Election Year
Most of writer/director James DeMonaco’s career has been his efforts with the Purge franchise, so each new entry into the canon shows the helmer finding more ways to further the original film’s...
View ArticleCarnage Park
Mickey Keating is trying his best to singlehandedly carry the mantle of the ’70s grindhouse horror tradition. From Pod to Darling and now Carnage Park, his love for psychological thrillers, pulp horror...
View ArticleMicrobe & Gasoline
Fittingly, it’s adolescence—that most liminal of ages, when the existential pressures of adulthood encroach upon the boundless imagination of a child—that pulls Michel Gondry back down to Earth. After...
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Revisit: The Apu Trilogy
Released between 1955 and 1959, Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy, is a treasure trove for film buffs. It serves as a meditation on not only the ascent from boyhood to manhood, but also the cyclical nature of...
View ArticleBuddymoon
Buddymoon is equal parts silly and stale. Alex Simmons’ debut narrative feature tracks best friends David (David Czarra Giuntoli) and Flula (Flula Borg) as they hike the Oregon mountains in the...
View ArticleThe Innocents
Director Anne Fontaine’s The Innocents takes one of cinema’s most frequently depicted historical events and completely subverts audience expectations. World War II films are typically a showcase for...
View ArticleLife, Animated
Disney movies rightfully take a lot of flak. Whether it’s a history of depicting racial stereotypes, perpetuating unrealistic body images and gender roles or glorifying high social status, there is no...
View ArticleThe Secret Life of Pets
Illumination Entertainment has yet to find its niche as an animated studio. Sure, they’ve found success with the Despicable Me franchise – though a spin-off, Minions didn’t go off as planned – but...
View ArticleOeuvre: Soderbergh: Gray’s Anatomy
Steven Soderbergh is one of cinema’s true geniuses, a fact perhaps nowhere more readily apparent than in Gray’s Anatomy, his 1996 adaptation of a Spalding Gray monologue. The difficulty of translating...
View ArticleCaptain Fantastic
It’s a plot that could have been written by Wes Anderson: Ben (Viggo Mortensen) is a father raising his kids off the grid in the Pacific Northwest. He puts them through daily fitness regimens and gives...
View ArticleFathers & Daughters
A movie as generic as its title, Fathers & Daughters is really about one father and one daughter. Their stories are separated by 25 years, but each is struggling to cope with the same trauma. For...
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Revisit: Ikiru
It is impossible to watch Ikiru (1952) without eventually thinking about your own mortality. Though our deaths are inevitable, we go through our lives either pretending the day will never come or...
View ArticleZero Days
In 1995, The Net terrified a very young me as I bared witness to what this horrible thing called “the Internet” could do to people. To say technology has come a long way since Sandra Bullock first...
View ArticleOur Little Sister
More than perhaps any other contemporary Japanese filmmaker, Hirokazu Kore-eda channels the tranquility and humanism of the great Yasujirô Ozu. Where his genre-fixated colleagues—Takeshi Kitano,...
View ArticleThe Debt
What’s worse than a white savior complex? A movie that hinges its sociopolitical drama on a trope-fueled white savior narrative. First-time writer/director Barney Elliott has admirable intentions for...
View ArticleHoly Hell! Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in...
In a January ‘96 column for the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert reflected on seeing one of that young year’s bigger hits, the Wayans comedy Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice...
View ArticleOeuvre: Soderbergh: Schizopolis
“In the event that you find certain sequences or ideas confusing, please bear in mind that this is your fault, not ours. You will need to see the picture again and again until you understand...
View ArticleThe Infiltrator
In the tradition of drug war-fueled crime thrillers, The Infiltrator has little new to say. This isn’t a genre reinvention. There’s not much that unravels here that hasn’t unraveled similar films based...
View ArticleGhostbusters
There is a scene in Paul Feig’s reboot of Ghostbusters where Abby Yates (Melissa McCarthy) is scrolling through some comments at the end of a YouTube video. Yates hopes the clip, featuring a...
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