Detour
Much like Rian Johnson’s Brick}, Christopher Smith’s Detouraims for gritty neo-noir with a fairly young cast. Tye Sheridan, Emory Cohen and Bel Powley are extremely talented up-and-comers, but the...
View ArticleHoly Hell! Titanic Turns 20
With La La Land scoring a record-tying 14 Oscar nominations on this past Tuesday morning, it is important to reflect upon the other two films that have achieved those same heights. When it comes to...
View ArticleOeuvre: Kiarostami: A Wedding Suit
After his first feature, The Traveler, Abbas Kiarostami spent the next few years making shorter films for the state education agency Kanun. Among these is the five-minute “Two Solutions for One...
View ArticleGold
The past few years have seen a bullish market for films about sleazy white men using cunning tactics of dubious legality to reap a virtual gold mine. Stephen Gaghan’s film about actual precious metal...
View ArticleI Am Michael
When a panic attack hits, you lose control of your heart, which beats like an overheating engine while you sweat and your vision blurs. But that’s not the worst part, because you also can’t control...
View ArticleRevisit: Suspiria
Though it has been rumored for many years, it was recently confirmed that a remake of Dario Argento’s 1977 horror classic Suspiria will go into production this year. The remake is in good hands, with A...
View ArticleThe Salesman
The use of Arthur Miller’s most famous play as both a diegetic production and clear textual reference point in The Salesman is almost too on the nose. As in A Separation, Asghar Farhadi’s film deals...
View ArticleBehemoth
As the postscript to Zhao Liang’s Behemoth notes, China currently boasts hundreds of “ghost towns,” hyper-modern planned cities which, despite their immense scale, are conspicuously short on actual...
View ArticleFrom the Vaults of Streaming Hell: Senorita Justice
Back in the days of brick and mortar video rental establishments, sandwiched between big displays of popular new releases, it was common to find a very special brand of movie. If you ever held a...
View ArticleSophie and the Rising Sun
If you’ve seen Maggie Greenwald’s earlier work, you already have a good idea of the typical themes in her films. Much like Songcatcher and The Ballad of Little Jo, the period piece Sophie and the...
View ArticleOeuvre: Kiarostami: The Report
Iran was at a pivotal crossroads in 1977, as mounting allegations of corruption and impropriety against the Shah, and by extension the Western-aligned government he represented, began to ignite the...
View ArticleThe Space Between Us
Mars is getting its day in the sun, a flurry of recent exploration missions by NASA only heightening the appeal of novels, films and a quasi-documentary TV mini-series that all attempt to peer into the...
View ArticleRings
There’s a good horror movie hiding somewhere within the garble of Rings. This mess should come as no surprise considering the confusing state of the Ring universe. While this is the second sequel to...
View ArticleI Am Not Your Negro
I Am Not Your Negro is exhilarating, breathtaking cinema that demands to be meditated upon, re-watched and discussed. It is so efficacious precisely because it is daringly transgressive in its...
View ArticleWar on Everyone
A panicked mime races through the back alleys of a sun-drenched New Mexico city. In hot pursuit are Detectives Bob Bolaño (Michael Peña) and Terry Monroe (Alexander Skarsgård), the local police...
View ArticleYouth in Oregon
For a movie focused on the controversial and depressive subject of assisted suicide, Youth in Oregon has a decidedly—some might say distastefully—quirky outlook. There’s the title, first of all: a...
View ArticleHoly Hell! A Life Less Ordinary Turns 20
There are some films that make you wonder who on Earth thought funding this was a good idea. 1997’s A Life Less Ordinary, directed by Danny Boyle and written by John Hodge, is an essential member of...
View ArticleOeuvre: Kiarostami: First Case, Second Case
The classroom has long been a favorite location for Iranian cinema. From the children in the leper colony of “The House Is Black” (1963) to director Sohrab Shahid Saless’s 1974 feature A Simple Event,...
View ArticleThe LEGO Batman Movie
Christopher Nolan’s gritty Dark Knight Trilogy rescued Batman from the folly of the late ‘90s installments, but it did so through a grim rendering that was often humorless to a fault. The LEGO Batman...
View ArticleJohn Wick: Chapter 2
Here in Portland, it seems as if everyone either drives for Lyft and Uber, or they know someone who does. I think about all these people, waiting in their cars for a message to pop up on their phones...
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