Criminally Underrated: God’s Country
God’s Country is edited together as something of a stream-of-consciousness exploration of the American spirit in 1979. As a whole, it is a profound meditation on place and identity. Yet taken on a...
View ArticleThe Challenge
There’s an almost inherently surreal quality attached to the assorted modern fiefdoms that make up the Emirates, a cluster of wealthy miniature kingdoms poised on the east coast of the Arabian...
View ArticleAmerican Assassin
In Neal Stephenson’s seminal cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, he sums up the young male experience thusly: “Until a man is 25, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be...
View ArticleMother!
Can a film that brutalizes women be feminist? Is a film by a self-obsessed male genius about a self-obsessed male genius a confession, or is it masturbation? Does a film that makes it impossible to...
View ArticleRebel in the Rye
After finally publishing and achieving overnight success with Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger refused offers to sell the rights to a production company, insisting that no film could do the story of...
View ArticleOeuvre: Demme: Philadelphia
Following the critical and commercial success of 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs, Jonathan Demme turned his attention to passion projects. In 1992 he completed a documentary about his cousin, Cousin...
View ArticleWoodpeckers
Woodpeckers is a small-scale film telling a conventional story in a contained and straightforward manner. The real novelty of the film is the setting—multiple prisons in the Dominican Republic. Both of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Revisit: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
The movie musical is among the most-maligned genres of filmmaking. There is something about characters breaking out into song that strips away the agreement viewers have with a movie. But why? Why can...
View ArticleThe Wilde Wedding
While The Wilde Wedding it appears to be a romantic comedy, it features little romance and even less comedy. The talented cast is left adrift by the script and the direction, and each member appears to...
View ArticleIn Search of Fellini
Opening with a dream-sequence that serves as a statement of purpose, In Search of Fellini is a film about cinema and the magic of the medium, its deep history and the joy it conjures in those who truly...
View ArticleFrom the Vaults of Streaming Hell: Nude on the Moon
If we can put a man on the moon, you may ask, why can’t we find a cure for cancer? This common frustration has a parallel in the world of film archives: if we can find a perfectly preserved print of...
View ArticleRat Film
We hate rats. We hate them so much that we wrongly blame them for the bubonic plague. It feels natural to use rats, as in the idiom “I smell a rat,” to symbolize an unknown evil. Baltimore filmmaker...
View ArticleFriend Request
Making a horror film set in the digital space of social media isn’t a bad idea in itself. If we’re talking about the isolation and loneliness that sets up harrowing sequences between potential victims...
View ArticleOeuvre: Demme: Beloved
Based on Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel, Jonathan Demme’s Beloved was a box office bomb that is largely remembered as one of the few blemishes on producer-star Oprah Winfrey’s résumé....
View ArticleKingsman: The Golden Circle
Matthew Vaughn may have avoided directing an unnecessary sequel by opting not to sit behind the camera on Kick-Ass 2 in 2013, but here comes Kingsman: The Golden Circle, a second part to a film that...
View ArticleLoving Vincent
Loving Vincent, the first fully hand-painted film, is both a technical triumph and a storytelling blunder. Taking years to create in collaboration with well over 100 painters, the film reflects on the...
View ArticleThe Tiger Hunter
Director Lena Khan’s debut feature The Tiger Hunter, a comedy about the immigrant experience in America, garners some laughs but ultimately relies too heavily on its kitschy ’70s setting and...
View ArticleRevisit: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly
By 1966, Sergio Leone had proven himself a master forger, a filmmaker whose exacting replications of Fordian vistas and the grimly observed honor codes of Akira Kurosawa showed an artist of great...
View ArticleWelcome to Willits
Welcome to Willits is a pure genre experience full of stock characters, standard narrative tropes and the sort of low-tech visuals audiences expect from minimal-budget horror slasher films. Within this...
View ArticleElizabeth Blue
Elizabeth Blue is a film so single-mindedly focused on its climactic moment that its director, Vincent Sabella, neglects any sense of pacing or middle-act storytelling. Fortunately, it hits its marks...
View Article