The Trip to Spain
Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon and Michael Winterbottom happened on a great idea when they pitched The Trip. Originally a TV series that was cut down to feature length, the project spawned subsequent series...
View ArticleIn This Corner of the World
There are several factors working against Sunao Katabuchi’s In This Corner of the World. First and foremost is that title. It prepares the audience for a syrup-drenched character study about Canadian...
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Rediscover: The Tree of Wooden Clogs
There is something fascinating about watching other human beings work. Perhaps there is the voyeuristic aspect of catching someone unawares, head tucked in while sawing a piece of wood or body stooped...
View ArticleNocturama
Nocturama is a cogent, stylish film that is consistently engaging, however without managing to fully suck the viewer into its world. The most audacious and worthwhile feature of the film is the way in...
View ArticleWhose Streets?
Whose Streets documents the aftermath of the murder of African-American teenager Mike Brown by white police officer Darren Wilson. It focuses on the residents and activists in Ferguson, Missouri who...
View ArticleFrom the Vaults of Streaming Hell: Black Shampoo
Plenty of blaxploitation films blatantly ripped off “white” mainstream films and reimagined them with predominantly black casts, but there’s something absurd about the inspiration for Black Shampoo....
View ArticleOeuvre: Demme: Swimming to Cambodia
Spalding Gray was the rage of the New York theater scene in the early ‘80s. Sitting alone at a desk with nothing but a child’s composition notebook, a glass of water and a microphone, he delivered a...
View ArticleLogan Lucky
Marked by precise, process-focused disquisitions on a wide variety of places, professions and practices, Steven Soderbergh’s films are often derided as coldly clinical, a designation rooted in the...
View ArticleLemon
Idiosyncrasy is no more an inherent virtue than it is a vice, but don’t tell that to Janicza Bravo and Brett Gelman. Together, the married couple wrote the darkly comedic oddity Lemon, a film that...
View ArticleMarjorie Prime
An ominous strain of music accompanies Marjorie (Lois Smith) as she shuffles through her home, stopping when she sits in a chair and the camera pivots to reveal Walter (Jon Hamm). This immediately...
View ArticleRevisit: The Money Pit
Despite how much the world loves Tom Hanks, not every Hanks vehicle was an instant success or has enjoyed a lasting legacy. Of late, his films are sincere, message-driven dramas, but we all know he got...
View ArticleGook
Writer-director Justin Chon’s provocatively titled Gook is set during the 1992 Los Angeles riots, but it has more on its mind than systematic injustice. Unlike Kathryn Bigelow’s brutal, horror-streaked...
View ArticleMenashe
Menashe is the first narrative feature from documentary filmmaker Joshua Z. Weinstein, and yet the film nevertheless approaches its subject from a documentarian’s perspective. Featuring a largely...
View ArticleHoly Hell! The Fifth Element Turns 20
Luc Besson’s love of the French comic series Valérian and Laureline has received quite a bit of press recently with the release of his feature film adaptation of the property, Valerian and the City of...
View ArticleOeuvre: Demme: Married to the Mob
Jonathan Demme’s follow-up to Something Wild was a modest hit that gave him the sort of name recognition that few directors ever get to enjoy. No matter what the genre, Demme became a brand name, and...
View ArticleIngrid Goes West
Social media – the hydra with many heads. To escape it completely is near impossible, and if we’re honest with ourselves, do we really want to? This is the central crux of Matt Spicer’s dark comic...
View ArticlePatti Cake$
Patti Cake$ is a feel-good misfit tale, a kind of Napoleon Dynamite crossed with Little Miss Sunshine by way of 8 Mile. It’s a particular success for breakout star Danielle Macdonald and debut...
View ArticleBeach Rats
In Beach Rats, director Eliza Hittman takes on the subject of homosexuality in an age when toxic masculinity has become a more visible topic in the cultural arena. The film opens with teenage...
View ArticleClash
Clash dramatizes a crucial moment in world history in a clever and original way, but ultimately it relies too heavily on pathos and plot conveniences, thereby failing to realize the promise of its...
View ArticleBushwick
At some point, a student of film has to reckon with Orson Welles and Touch of Evil for at least two reasons: One will be a cultural critique pertaining to the casting of white actors as ethnic...
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