A United Kingdom
Even in today’s culture of intense social upheaval and divisive hot-button issues, there are still people who stubbornly define themselves as apolitical, avoiding the indignity of having to choose a...
View ArticleKedi
Cities have a peculiar order to them. What looks on its face to be a chaotic cacophony is revealed upon closer inspection to be a carefully coordinated dance. Markets are teeming with life and action,...
View ArticleRevisit: Pink Floyd: The Wall
We all crave it. When times are bad, we long for something to take our minds off of things. Society makes it easy to prolong this liberation for the whole of a person’s life and to avoid facing one’s...
View ArticleSpeed Sisters
For a debut documentary feature, Speed Sisters aims high. Director Amber Fares attempts to highlight not only sexism in the Middle East but life under occupation. Her subjects are the first all-female...
View ArticleHavenhurst
Given that it is a disease that touches the lives of so many people, addiction is woefully unrepresented on film screens. When it is, the portrayal is often one-note. This is one area where horror...
View ArticleCriminally Underrated: King Kong (2005)
Though Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake of 1933’s revolutionary monster movie King Kong was well received upon its release, it didn’t garner the praise it deserved and its reputation seems to have sunk...
View ArticleOeuvre: Kiarostami: Where Is the Friend’s Home?
Schoolteachers in Abbas Kiarostami’s filmography are almost always intimidating, the first institutional authority figures presented to developing children and their first taste of rigorous punishment...
View ArticleA Cure for Wellness
Ever since Mousehunt, Gore Verbinski has made his name with films that work best as colossal Rube Goldberg devices, epically scaled works that show off a detailed imagination for elaborate action...
View ArticleThe Great Wall
If you’ve already written The Great Wall off as 1) a horrible premise for a film and 2) another in a long line of embarrassing White Savior movies, you’re not entirely wrong. Judging from the poster,...
View ArticleLovesong
Understatement goes both ways. When things go unspoken, that pressing silence either gives the mounting tension serious weight and a sense of depth, or the silence betrays thinly drawn characters. So...
View ArticleXX
Historically underrepresented in the director’s chair, women are particularly scarce at the helm of horror flicks. Complete with a not-so-subtle chromosomal title, the anthology XX takes a step toward...
View ArticleAmerican Fable
A Pan’s Labyrinth for flyover country, American Fable crosses horror-tinged fantasy with a coming-of-age fairy tale firmly rooted in the unique virtues of the American Midwest, the oft-overlooked...
View ArticleYou’re Killing Me Susana
You’re Killing Me Susana is a film that relishes its low stakes with self-awareness, resulting in lots of laughs, a skin-deep deconstruction of stereotypical Mexican machismo and a surprisingly...
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Revisit: Woman in the Dunes
Kenji Mizoguchi’s classic 1954 film Sansho the Bailiff begins with a betrayal. A mother, traveling in 11th century Japan with her two children, takes refuge with a kindly priestess. The next morning,...
View ArticleFrom the Vaults of Streaming Hell: Atomic Dog
Notable for being the least funky movie ever named for a most funky song, the 1998 made-for-TV horror movie Atomic Dog is a competent waste of an inspired concept. The title alone seems to promise...
View ArticleKeep Quiet
The irresistible and timely premise of the documentary Keep Quiet revolves around the identity crisis suffered by Csanád Szegedi, a Hungarian ultra-nationalist who served in the leadership of the...
View ArticleOeuvre: Abbas Kiarostami: Homework
Abbas Kiarostami often seems like one of the gentlest of directors, but one of his most favored locations is a place that critic Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa calls a veritable “museum of torture: the...
View ArticleGet Out
Get Out, the new fright flick directed by comedian Jordan Peele (from TV’s “Key and Peele”), is a masterful blend of suspense, comedy and nuanced cultural observation. Not since 1968’s Night of the...
View ArticleDying Laughing
Stand-up comedians are perhaps the most vulnerable of performers. Musicians, dancers and thespians may equally pour themselves into their work, but ultimately it’s the work itself (often dressed up in...
View ArticleThe Girl with All the Gifts
Melanie (Sennia Nanua) is the classic “good child,” the kid who suffers panic attacks if teacher won’t call on her. But when she catches a whiff of anything human, her eyes bug out, her teeth chatter...
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