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Revisit: Boyhood
Is there another director as obsessed with the passage of time as Richard Linklater? His three Before films, taken as a whole, are exercises in the rite of aging, a piercing look at one couple who...
View ArticleAutumn Lights
Autumn Lights opens promisingly: As flinty North Atlantic surf crashes against volcanic sand, the camera pans to reveal a verdant green slope meeting the angry sea, a foreboding steely gray sky and a...
View ArticleIn a Valley of Violence
In a Valley of Violence is a revenge-driven shoot-‘em-up Western with enough gaping plot holes to ensure no viewer takes it too seriously. This is basic route genre filmmaking, with an ambivalently...
View ArticleFear, Inc.
Fear, Inc., the debut feature from director Vincent Masciale, takes a four-minute short and squanders its potential with a body-bag of in-jokes. Screenwriter Luke Barnett of Funny or Die reveals a...
View ArticleFire at Sea
With Fire at Sea, director Gianfranco Rosi addresses the largest, most severe humanitarian crisis in the history of the world. The documentary is set on Lampedusa, an Italian-governed Mediterranean...
View ArticleHoly Hell! Matilda Turns 20
Perhaps more than any other kind of movie, children’s films tend to be dated by their era more than any other. Not even science fiction, which is forever limited by the technological imagination of...
View ArticleOeuvre: Soderbergh: And Everything is Going Fine
In an interview for the “Making of…” featurette for And Everything is Going Fine, Steven Soderbergh confesses that wanting penance for being a bad friend was one of his primary motivations for...
View ArticleInferno
The most impressive aspect of the Robert Langdon film series being a billion dollar franchise is how ruinously mundane its premise and core structure continues to be. The Da Vinci Code was the most...
View ArticleGehenna: Where Death Lives
Special-effects talent Hiroshi Katagiri stretches a shoestring budget to impressive lengths in his crowdfunded directorial debut, Gehenna: Where Death Lives, at least when it comes to the creature...
View ArticleGimme Danger
Jim Jarmusch has a thing for outcasts. The characters in his films, like the lovelorn vampires in Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) or the stoic assassin in Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999), tend...
View ArticleBy Sidney Lumet
Dog Day Afternoon. Serpico. Network. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. Looking over Sidney Lumet’s 50-year career as a director of both television and movies showcases a remarkable talent whose films...
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Revisit: Brief Encounter
Tales of unrequited love or a love that meets a tragic ending seem to elicit more tears than affairs that end happily. From Camille to The Bridges of Madison County to Before Sunrise, love found and...
View ArticleThe Eagle Huntress
There are parts of The Eagle Huntress that are unlike anything that has ever before been captured on mainstream film. For instance, there is a scene where our heroine, 13 year-old Aisholpan, captures a...
View ArticleDon’t Call Me Son
Amidst conversations of gender fluidity and socio-economic class, Brazilian director Anna Muylaert’s Don’t Call Me Son (whose original title directly translates as There is One Mother) raises age-old...
View ArticleFrom the Vaults of Streaming Hell: RoboRex
Talking dog movies are bad enough. But a talking robot dog? From the future? Sent to the present to help you save the world from the apocalypse? Excuse me, save the world from our token mad scientist,...
View ArticleOeuvre: Soderbergh: Contagion
Not long after the release of Contagion (2011), Steven Soderbergh announced his retirement from filmmaking, claiming he had decided to focus on painting as his primary form of expression. His plan was...
View ArticleDoctor Strange
By now, the Marvel model for movie success is so airtight that seeing a new release set in their sprawling cinematic universe feels like an unnecessary endeavor. From the announcements about creative...
View ArticleDog Eat Dog
Like much of Paul Schrader’s 21st-century work, Dog Eat Dog is a formal experiment more than a narrative feature. Its shot transitions are frenetic and effects-laden, and the frame is in a constant...
View ArticleLoving
For a movie that chronicles the true story of one of the most important Supreme Court cases in American history, Loving is an oddly understated experience. Director Jeff Nichols (Take Shelter) treats...
View ArticlePeter and the Farm
Shortly after he finished art school decades ago, Peter Dunning lost half a hand in a sawmill accident. Up to that point he’d studied painting and sculpting and had gone on to work long hours of manual...
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