The Commune
Thomas Vinterberg’s oeuvre has been fairly consistently hyper-focused on love, family life and community dynamics. From his Dogme 95 days to The Hunt, his films are pointed and candid, and unabashedly...
View ArticleOeuvre: Kiarostami: Certified Copy
One of the more notable characteristics of Abbas Kiarostami’s work is that so many of his scenes appear to tell multiple stories at once. An expert at effectively using non-professional actors,...
View ArticleBerlin Syndrome
Berlin Syndrome suffers from an ailment common among independent genre films: it tries too hard. This is more likely due to the need to satisfy backers rather than any artistic choice by director Cate...
View ArticleRediscover: A New Leaf
As Elaine May’s feature debut, A New Leaf finds the comedienne at the end of the first stage of career and at the onset of the next. Prior to the 1971 film, May had established herself as one of the...
View ArticleWar Machine
“Ah, America, you beacon of composure and proportionate response,” a sarcastic narrator says over the opening images of David Michôd’s War Machine. The line, deadpan but obvious in its criticism,...
View ArticleBlack Butterfly
Meta-tales of writers becoming entrenched in their own worlds are satisfying when they’re done well. Brian Goodman’s Black Butterfly, a remake of a French TV-movie about a murder mystery writer past...
View ArticleDrone
Drone is not a movie. It desperately wants you to think it is: there are aerial shots (so many aerial shots), Sean Bean grimaces a lot and several scenes are oversaturated and edited with the flowy...
View ArticleFrom the Vaults of Streaming Hell: Timber Tramps
This week we plumb the depths not of Netflix Instant or YouTube, but one of the forgotten archives of streaming entertainment: Dailymotion. You probably don’t even think of the site unless it’s as a...
View ArticleOeuvre: Kiarostami: Like Someone in Love
Even in films made in his native Iran, Abbas Kiarostami and his characters frequently wandered: from house to house, town to town, on foot or, in his preferred mode of transportation, by car, whose...
View ArticleWonder Woman
It’s been said the fundamental difference between DC and Marvel characters is that the former are gods while the latter are superhumans. So, it’s counterintuitive, and a bit delicious, to report that...
View ArticleBand Aid
“I come from a long line of Holocaust survivors,” Anna (Zoe Lister-Jones) says to her husband, Ben (Adam Pally) in one of their early, vicious verbal spats in Band Aid. Without missing a beat, Ben...
View ArticleI, Daniel Blake
It’s not unheard of for a film to receive awards more for its message than its merits as a film. That appears to be the case with I, Daniel Blake, a film about the inanities of the bureaucracies that...
View ArticleLetters from Baghdad
When writing Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel hunted for every shred of information she could find on Thomas Cromwell, Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII and the rest of her historical cast in the letters and records of...
View ArticleThe Exception
The handsome, sturdy film debut of acclaimed theater director David Leveaux is the kind of historical cinematic drama that has become increasingly rare in this golden age of television, which gives...
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Rediscover: Heart of a Dog
The politics of death are tricky in our Western society. What does one say to the dying to comfort them and what words can you offer to those reeling from grief? When is it appropriate to console and...
View ArticlePast Life
Past Life is an engrossing period drama that utilizes its superior mise-en-scéne and charismatic leads to overcome a tonal shift in the third act so jarring it would derail most films. For most of its...
View ArticleDark Signals
Dark Signal is a serviceable horror film with a strong premise marred by some shoddy writing and uninspiring execution. At its center, there’s a striking hook to hang a genre exercise on, but the...
View ArticleHoly Hell! The Lost World: Jurassic Park Turns 20
Jurassic Park parlayed Steven Spielberg’s paternal hang-ups into Alan Grant, the crabby paleontologist made into a reluctant protector of the film’s two children. However ham-fisted the arc may be, it...
View ArticleOeuvre: Demme: Caged Heat
Founded in 1970 after his departure from legendary B-movie studio American International Pictures, Roger Corman’s New World Pictures was a second beginning for the celebrated shlock-meister, who...
View ArticleIt Comes at Night
With It Comes at Night, writer-director Trey Edward Shults follows his impressive debut Krisha with a thriller so intentionally vague that it will leave many viewers scratching their heads. Despite...
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