Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
The year leading up to Rogue One’s release has been plagued with production trouble stories and the overwhelming sense that Disney’s Star Wars standalone series is destined to be little more than a...
View ArticleFrank & Lola
It’s amazing what director Matthew Ross achieves with this, his feature-film debut. A director of short films for nearly twenty years, Ross has finally transitioned to feature lengths with his...
View ArticleWhy Him?
While there’s certainly nothing new about the concept of a middle-aged fuddy-duddy bristling at his beloved daughter’s brash new suitor, Why Him? adds the wrinkle that the new boyfriend isn’t some...
View ArticleHarry Benson: Shoot First
Celebrity photography stops people in their tracks. Look at the work of legendary photographer Richard Avedon or Andy Warhol’s painting; both characters captured fleeting moments of vulnerability in...
View ArticleSugar Mountain
Movies about idiotic schemes don’t necessarily have to be subpar themselves. They can latch onto irony, satire or even hubris to create narrative depth. But when the idiocy of the characters’ plot...
View ArticleLion
For heartwarming true stories to transcend sentimentalism, the journey must be more powerful than the destination. Whether it’s a famous historical event or merely an incredible human-interest story,...
View ArticleThe Hollow Point
Before we get into the meat of this review, there are two unassailable facts to address. One, this film isn’t very good. Two, that doesn’t matter in the slightest. Why should quality not matter?...
View ArticleAssassin’s Creed
Nothing tempers expectations for a film’s quality like seeing “based on the hit video game” tucked away on the poorly-produced poster. In the pantheon of severely shitty video game movies, Assassin’s...
View ArticleA Kind of Murder
By adapting Patricia Highsmith’s 1954 novel The Blunderer into the indie feature A Kind of Murder, screenwriter Susan Boyd has attempted a sort of feminist crime thriller, one whose psychological...
View ArticleSing
This has been a golden year for movies featuring anthropomorphized characters, as four of 2016’s top five films (in terms of worldwide gross) feature talking animals. With this in mind, writer-director...
View ArticleThe Autopsy of Jane Doe
The Autopsy of Jane Doe falls into the cinematic pitfall of wasting an intriguing premise and well-crafted setup on a woefully contrived third act. In doing so, the English-language debut of André...
View ArticleFences
In 2010, Denzel Washington and Viola Davis won Tony Awards for their performances in the Broadway revival of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize winning drama Fences. Now, Wilson’s stirring tale of a black...
View ArticlePassengers
Big studios used to save the best for last, rolling out their prestige films on and around Christmas. However, the big yuletide movies this year are the type often reserved for the dead zone of...
View ArticleA Monster Calls
Director J.A. Bayona’s debut feature The Orphanage (2007) showed his ability to portray horror from a child’s perspective. His next film, The Impossible (2012), proved he could use state of the art...
View ArticleSilence
Ever since Martin Scorsese filmed Harvey Keitel steadying his palm over a flame in Mean Streets (1973), the director’s uneasy relationship with faith has burrowed its way into his movies. “It’s all...
View ArticleHidden Figures
The three protagonists of Hidden Figures—Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe)—are inspirational figures, women of color who rose to...
View Article20th Century Women
20th Century Women, the latest film by Thumbsucker director Mike Mills, finds intoxicating specificity in its time and location. The story takes place in 1979 and unfolds against the backdrop of sunny...
View ArticleThe Ardennes
We first meet Kenny (Kevin Janssens) at the front of a courtroom. As the previous scene briefly, hectically establishes, he’s been forced to take the fall for a botched break-in carried out along with...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Revisit: Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
About 10 years ago, I showed Dr. Strangelove to a group of my high school students but didn’t tell them that the film was a comedy. I was teaching in rural New Hampshire and none of them had heard of...
View ArticleNeruda
2016 was a big year for Pablo Larraín, marking the release of three new films, each of them aimed at interpreting the aftermath to a momentous, messily diffuse tragedy. The most high-profile of these...
View Article