Rediscover: The Three Musketeers (1973)
There are so many adaptations of Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers that one very frequently runs into another, failing to stand out with its own distinctive voice. Woefully underrated director...
View ArticleObit
Typical newspaper articles follow a time-tested “inverted pyramid” structure. By starting broad and adding increasing detail with each subsequent paragraph, they simultaneously offer the most pertinent...
View ArticleThe Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki
No matter their incidental differences, sports films tend to follow the same trajectory. We are typically paired up with an underdog, a scrappy fighter or pitcher with something to prove and watch as...
View ArticleHoly Hell! Starship Troopers Turns 20
War satire comes in many forms, but rarely is there a film so aggressively in conflict with its own source material as Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers. An original script with the Ed Woodian title...
View ArticleOeuvre: Kiarostami: Ten
Abbas Kiarostami’s Ten opens with a long scene of a young boy in a car’s front passenger seat, capturing his mounting rage at his mother, who’s heard speaking but excluded from the tight, unevenly...
View ArticleBuster’s Mal Heart
Rami Malek has a lot of experience portraying mentally unstable characters that spend a lot of time talking to potential hallucinations. “Mr. Robot” harnesses paranoia and distrust of corporate...
View ArticleA Dark Song
On the outside, A Dark Song, the strong, self-assured debut for Irish writer-director Liam Gavin, is a simple, well-told occult thriller. It’s suitably creepy, featuring several genuine scares, and...
View ArticleSleight
Is there room for the little guy in today’s oversized world of superhero movies? Hollywood comic book cinema loves to pay lip service to the underdog (as evinced in the recent trailer for Spider-Man:...
View ArticleOne Week and a Day
One Week and a Day is the sort of low-stakes, crowd-pleasing dramedy that the film industry has churned out with an assembly-line-like efficiency for the past decade. The characters are...
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Revisit: Buena Vista Social Club
We stood on the parapets of the Palacio de Valle, the Spanish-Moorish palace in Cienfuegos now turned restaurant and bar, waiting for the sun to set. A group of Cuban musicians sat to one side, there...
View ArticleVoice From the Stone
Grief is a messy experience, one that reveals itself in behavior that’s alternately volatile, depressive, withdrawn or anxious, and the way it reshapes our perception of both the past and the present...
View ArticleCriminally Underrated: Murder By Death
When thinking of ensemble mystery film about a group of people invited to a remote mansion to solve a murder, your mind will likely land on either Clue or Murder by Death. And, these days, it seems...
View ArticleHarold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story
Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story is what the boys in marketing used to call a human interest story. In the short span of 100 minutes, writer/director Daniel Raim offers an overview of...
View ArticleOeuvre: Kiarostami: Five
Abbas Kiarostami was a master of long takes. The closing shot of Life, and Nothing More…, for instance, told a moving and powerful story as the camera recorded, from a distance, a vast landscape...
View ArticleGuardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
It seemed like a gamble when writer-director James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy debuted back in 2014. Like its ragtag group of heroes, Gunn’s movie was the scrappy underdog in the ever-expanding...
View ArticleThe Dinner
Steve Coogan did his best Richard Gere impression in The Trip, and it was uncanny. Oren Moverman clearly followed his lead, casting the two as brothers in The Dinner. Stan (Gere, standing out by virtue...
View ArticleChuck
The prevalence of boxing in the sports movie canon has always been peculiar. The firm individualism of the sport makes it an easier fit for dramatic structure, but all of the more complex themes of...
View ArticleRediscover: The Films of Harry Langdon
Rich, expansive and more than a bit murky, the pre-sound era represents one of the most abundant periods in film history, one from which strange new wonders continue to emerge. While as many as...
View ArticleAnother Evil
Loneliness can do weird things to a person. Just look at the disturbing ingratiation of Jim Carrey’s lonely, rubber-faced stalker in The Cable Guy, a film that’s difficult to keep from one’s mind when...
View ArticleBurden
First-time documentary filmmakers Richard Dewey and Timothy Marrinan’s Burden is a solid, if unexceptional exploration of the visionary performance artist Chris Burden. It’s beautifully assembled,...
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