Oeuvre: Kiarostami: Taste of Cherry
Developed in the 16th century, perfected in the early 17th with Don Quixote, the picaresque tradition helped form the foundation for novelistic satire, allowing its characters, skulking about the...
View ArticleThe Void
John Carpenter hasn’t released a feature film in seven years, but nevertheless, he’s been all over the screen lately. You can see his visual influence in the suburban panoramas of It Follows and in the...
View ArticleSalt and Fire
Ensconced among the highest reaches of the Bolivian Andes, the Salar de Uyuni is the world’s largest salt flat, an otherworldly slab of crusted chlorides cast in a shimmering alabaster hue. A sunbaked...
View ArticleRediscover: The Ghastly Ones
Andy Milligan, who made over 30 films in his lifetime, would be on many critics’ list of the worst directors of all time. Yet filmmakers from talking-animal movie factory David DeCoteau to Nicholas...
View ArticleThe Transfiguration
Like recent vampire film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, The Transfiguration goes the artsy route, presenting low key, brooding fare. On top of that, vampirism is less literal and more metaphorical...
View ArticleFrom the Vaults of Streaming Hell: Stitches
Professional clowns have been up in arms lately over the growing buzz surrounding the cinematic revival of Stephen King’s It and resurrection of its nightmarish killer clown Pennywise. King himself has...
View ArticleColossal
Colossal, writer/director Nacho Vigalondo’s new film about a drunken American woman’s mysterious connection to a giant monster attacking South Korea, features incredible central performances, a...
View ArticleOeuvre: Kiarostami: The Wind Will Carry Us
Near the beginning of Abbas Kiarostami’s 1999 classic The Wind Will Carry Us, the main character, called the Engineer (Behzad Dorani), quotes a poem by Sohrab Sepehri in order to describe his...
View ArticleThe Fate of the Furious
F. Gary Gray, coming off of the strong Straight Outta Compton and the artist behind several of the best music videos of all time, would seem like the perfect director to take the Fast and the Furious...
View ArticleThe Lost City of Z
James Gray, among the most consistently neglected of America’s great film directors, has long been praised by his few but vocal supporters for upholding the idioms and techniques of classic filmmaking....
View ArticleQueen of the Desert
Queen of the Desert is a plotless, pointless film founded upon fraught political assumptions that are even more dangerous within our current geopolitical context. It luxuriates in its bombastic...
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Revisit: Short Cuts
Robert Altman was never known as a miserablist director, but his 1993 film Short Cuts, a three-hour mosaic based on the writings of Raymond Carver, sure has sadness to spare. An ensemble piece that...
View ArticleA Quiet Passion
Emily Dickinson is most famous, beyond her caustic, paradigm-shifting verse, for her reclusiveness, a quality that helped resign her to obscurity during her lifetime and continues to plague her...
View ArticleFrom the Vaults of Streaming Hell: Dragonfyre
Are you a fan of The Lord of the Rings, westerns, military flashback dramas and… rednecks? Well, to each their own. But if you do happen to fall into this niche group, Dragonfyre (aka Orc Wars) was...
View ArticleMy Entire High School Sinking into the Sea
In his directorial debut, graphic novelist Dash Shaw uses vivid magical realism to imbue the equivalent of textbook-cover doodles with enough verve and wit to create a compelling, if somewhat...
View ArticleOeuvre: Kiarostami: ABC Africa
To any seasoned set of eyes, Abbas Kiarostami’s ABC Africa (2001) appears almost immediately suspect. There’s that title, first of all. Apparently taken from the letters embroidered on an infant...
View ArticleThe Promise
There’s finding love in a hopeless place, and then there’s the premise of The Promise, which sets a love triangle against the backdrop of the Armenian Genocide. It is a movie seemingly erected around...
View ArticleFree Fire
If you’ve ever wondered what it would look like to watch a dozen bleeding tough guys (and one steely woman) crawl around a dusty warehouse floor while shooting guns at each other for the better part of...
View ArticleThe Student
A strident commentary on contemporary Russian society, Kirill Serebrennikov’s The Student turns a familiar coming-of-age scenario into a morally wrought conflict. Brooding teenager Veniamin Yuzhin...
View ArticleTomorrow
Things have been rough for the climate movement since the release of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth in 2006. In an effort to hinder cultural change and action, climate denial has been dialed up to 11....
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