Girl Asleep
There is certainly a place for hyper-stylized films. Just ask Wes Anderson. But the fine line between stylizing for its own sake and stylizing to enrich the story is the same line that separates good...
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Rediscover: A Brighter Summer Day
Most American movie lovers likely know Edward Yang for Yi Yi, his bittersweet swansong from 2000 that chronicled the triumphs and travails of a modern Taiwanese family. Lyrical, heartfelt and dense, Yi...
View ArticleThe Lovers and the Despot
Kim Jong-il was a major cinephile. The late North Korean dictator reportedly owned a collection of over 20,000 video tapes and DVDs. In addition to ruling over the most isolated and repressed nation in...
View ArticleI.T.
I.T. is the kind of predictably “current” cheap thriller that is almost redeemed by its sheer inanity. The premise feels like it was drawn from those Facebook posts that circulate on your relatives’...
View ArticleSeed: The Untold Story
It was nearly 40 years ago that Wendell Berry, in his singular prose, condemned the profligacy of U.S. consumerism and castigated our society’s wrongdoings by prophesying a coming reckoning in the The...
View ArticleHoly Hell! The Birdcage Turns 20
“This drag comedy is aimed squarely at middle America, where these cuddly queens should play very well,” said a writer for TV Guide about The Birdcage before adding the caveat: “just so long as nobody...
View ArticleOeuvre: Soderbergh: Ocean’s Thirteen
By the time Ocean’s Thirteen, the third and final film in Steven Soderbergh’s comic heist trilogy, came around in 2007, there was no need to re-introduce the cast of characters. At this point, Don...
View ArticleDeepwater Horizon
Peter Berg’s original transition from acting to directing was characterized by “fun”-minded films like Very Bad Things and The Rundown. But other than outliers like the messy genre exercises Hancock...
View ArticleMiss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, Tim Burton’s new film based on Ransom Riggs’ bestselling novel, is a baffling adaptation. One of the few bestselling fiction books with an actual visual...
View ArticleAmerican Honey
Director Andrea Arnold has said that mystery is a rare and valuable commodity in a film. It is important to Arnold that the audience engages with the story and draws its own conclusions. Her latest...
View ArticleA Man Called Ove
Swedish exports are at an all-time high. Some of the most lucrative exports are bleak murder mysteries, but thanks to writers like Jonas Jonasson and Fredrik Backman there’s an entire market for quirky...
View ArticleRevisit: Soul Man
On their late-‘90s mathcore classic We Are the Romans, Botch roasted punk bands that used politics as a gimmick on “C. Thomas Howell as the ‘Soul Man’.” This long and esoteric song title refers to the...
View ArticleDanny Says
Music journalist, publicist and producer, Danny Fields helped some of the most influential bands of the ‘60s and ‘70s get their start: The Stooges, The MC5 and The Ramones are just a handful of the...
View ArticleClowntown
Nobody goes into a horror movie called Clowntown expecting substance, but a little respect for the form would be nice. This awkward, silly regurgitation of tropes barely functions as a hate watch,...
View ArticleOeuvre: Soderbergh: Che
Note: the author is a Latin American historian with a specialty in the ‘60s revolutionary movements that spread throughout the continent largely as a consequence of Che Guevara. This is a deeply...
View ArticleThe Birth of a Nation
When I was in high school, way back in the mid-90s, I worked at a movie theater, sweeping floors and taking tickets. It was a good job, but the theater life hardens you. Whenever Mel Gibson’s...
View ArticleThe Girl on the Train
The Girl On The Train opens with Rachel Watson (Emily Blunt) riding a train (duh) and telling the audience about a house she passes on her way to and from work every day, where she watches a woman live...
View ArticleBlue Jay
Blue Jay opens with an aesthetic flourish, a montage of small-town life rendered in velvety black and white and scored to Julian Wass’ post-rock electronic squall. There’s an artiness to this sequence...
View ArticleUnder the Shadow
Under the Shadow, a response to modern society’s predilection for political violence, resorts to the tropes of a horror-film narrative to make its poignant claims about its effects on ordinary people....
View ArticleThe Lennon Report
John Lennon died in an era when news traveled much differently than it does today. CNN was in its infancy as the first 24-hour cable news channel, and the internet was unfathomable at the time, much...
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