Railroad Tigers
Ostensibly, Railroad Tigers is a film about the Chinese resistance during the Sino-Japanese War. But it stars Jackie Chan, albeit not up to his usual level of high-flying stunts in his older age. The...
View ArticleHoly Hell! Boogie Nights Turns 20
Twenty years on, Boogie Nights remains a brash statement of purpose from perhaps the greatest American filmmaker of his generation. Paul Thomas Anderson, harboring hard feelings from studio executives’...
View ArticleOeuvre: Kiarostami: Early Shorts and The Experience
Director Abbas Kiarostami, who died last year at the age of 76, strayed from the cinematic norm from the beginning of his career. When he worked on his very first short film, his cinematographer “was...
View ArticleMonster Trucks
Judging solely based on the ridiculous poster for Monster Trucks, one would be forgiven for expecting prime hate watch material. A giant truck with Hentai tentacles unfurling from the chassis leaps...
View ArticlePatriots Day
Almost exactly a year ago today, I was assigned to see Michael Bay’s 13 Hours, about the attack by Islamic militants on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi. It was, predictably, a pretty bad movie. It was...
View Article100 Streets
Regardless of your station in life, you’re going to be sad—an improved financial situation only changes your problems. At least that’s what veteran television director Jim O’Hanlon’s feature film...
View ArticleRediscover: Mafioso
Alberto Lattuada’s black comedy Mafioso arrived during a particularly potent phase in Italian cinema, and it holds a unique place in the country’s film history. Released in 1962, it arrived in the wake...
View ArticlePaterson
Jim Jarmusch’s latest exercise in vivid minimalism seeks out poetry in the mundane. Through artful repetition and meticulous attention to pacing, imagery and structure, Jarmusch follows a week in the...
View ArticleClaire in Motion
Lack of closure can short circuit the grieving process. This is especially true when it’s not completely certain whether a loved one is alive or dead. At the opening of Claire in Motion, a math...
View ArticleThe Crash
Writer-director Aram Rappaport’s new techno-financial thriller The Crash is set in the near future but is so crusty that it feels about 20 years past its due. The sets appear to have been cobbled...
View ArticleAlone in Berlin
A period film about Nazi resistance is expected to be staid and stoic. Vincent Perez’s Alone in Berlin epitomizes that, seemingly attempting to conform to those period film clichés and aspiring to no...
View ArticleFrom the Vaults of Streaming Hell: Mutant
Two big city brothers descend upon small-town Georgia to find it overtaken by zombies whose hands are infected with some kind of vaginal stigmata that oozes chemical waste. Originally released as Night...
View ArticleOeuvre: Kiarostami: The Traveler
The opening shots of Abbas Kiarostami’s The Traveler, his second feature, are jarring when viewed in hindsight. The boisterous activity of the camera as it documents a children’s football game in an...
View ArticleSplit
Though it seemed as if he would serve as a cautionary tale of precocious talent sunk by a propensity for excess and gimmicks, M. Night Shyamalan has rewritten his legacy with his recent work. Split...
View ArticleXXX: Return of Xander Cage
It’s been 15 years since Vin Diesel’s turn as “The X-Games James Bond” Xander Cage. In the ensuing time, Diesel’s become a movie star par excellence, anchoring the most important action franchise in...
View ArticleThe Red Turtle
Over 31 fruitful years, Studio Ghibli has cultivated an iconic house animation style, working off a distinctive, often hand-drawn foundation to tell timeless stories with a pointedly modern focus....
View ArticleTrespass Against Us
TV and music video director Adam Smith makes his feature debut with Trespass Against Us, a scraggly, uneven British crime movie about a family of criminals on the verge of coming undone. The title is...
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Revisit: The New World
The New World (2005) exists, for many, a curiosity huddled between the twin sequoias of Terrence Malick’s filmography, The Thin Red Line (1998) and The Tree of Life (2011). Coming after a 20-year...
View ArticleStaying Vertical
Staying Vertical is a film that cannot fulfill its own potential because it is unable to escape writer-director Alain Guiraudie’s cult of his own personality. The film, at its best, provokes the viewer...
View ArticleJulieta
The words “Un film de Almodóvar” unspooling at the beginning of a movie are a visual safety blanket for art film lovers. For more than 30 years, we know what to expect when they flash across the...
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