November Criminals
If watching Baby Driver highlighted Ansel Elgort’s potential as a leading man, November Criminals seems to exist only to undercut whatever promise Edgar Wright’s getaway driver thriller displayed. This...
View ArticlePhantom Thread
Acting as his own cinematographer, Paul Thomas Anderson films the initial scenes of Phantom Thread with the same overlit, finely detailed close-ups that have characterized his recent output. We see the...
View ArticleKaleidoscope
When one views the world through a fractured lens, frightening consequences can befall anyone who enters that person’s orbit. Kaleidoscope’s namesake novelty toy not only plays a figurative role in the...
View ArticleQuest
A few minutes into Jonathan Olshefski’s bold, beautiful, decade-in-the-making new documentary Quest, Christine’a “Ma Quest” Rainey says, “I just like a good storyline.” It’s a throwaway statement, part...
View ArticleRevisit: Twin Peaks
David Lynch infamously left “Twin Peaks,” his macabre, unclassifiable television project, in its second season over a conflict with ABC producers who refused to allow him and co-writer Mark Frost to...
View ArticleBullet Head
Bullet Head, written and directed by Paul Solet, proves that, just when you thought you’d seen it all, someone will go and mash up a caper-gone-wrong flick with a Frankenstein movie. The movie scoops...
View ArticleStar Wars: The Last Jedi
In the lead up to the Star Wars: The Force Awakens release two years ago, most excited fans ignored the studio’s chosen title for the film and just referred to it as “New Star Wars.” But it wasn’t. Not...
View ArticleHollow in the Land
Hollow in the Land luxuriates in the tropes common to the subgenre of thrillers about poor white people. All the signifiers associated with white trash are included: bonfires, drugs, a trailer park, a...
View ArticleThe Shape of Water
The plot is simple enough: a mute cleaning woman and a monster that looks like something out of Creature from the Black Lagoon fall in love. Nothing else in The Shape of Water, including its villain,...
View ArticleThe Ballad of Lefty Brown
A modern adaptation of the classic Western thriller, The Ballad of Lefty Brown adopts such standard tropes as betrayal and double-crosses, youthful brazenness versus the learned wisdom of the aged and...
View ArticleBeyond Skyline
The original Skyline, from music video/SFX mavens the Brothers Strause, was a pretty straightforward fusion dance of Cloverfield and Independence Day. Nobody really gave a shit about it, but it made...
View ArticleJumanji: Welcome to the Jungle
Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is a sequel to a 22-year-old film, which itself was based off a now-36-year-old children’s book, so the fact that its biggest strength is the fresh originality of its...
View ArticleThe Greatest Showman
Crafting a biopic around circus impresario P.T. Barnum has always had controversy in its wake, particularly once the disabled community took to actively criticizing Barnum’s treatment of his...
View ArticleMolly’s Game
It was only a matter of time before Academy Award-winning screenwriter Aaron Sorkin decided to transition to directing. Maybe it’s appropriate, then, that so much of his directorial debut, Molly’s...
View ArticleAll the Money in the World
It’s lucky that the press surrounding Ridley Scott’s latest film is so busy with the drama behind the scenes rather than in front of the camera. As you probably know, Christopher Plummer replaced...
View ArticleThe Post
There’s never been a more optimal time to release a movie about the necessity of the free press. It’s why I recommend seeking out the fantastic documentary, Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press. This...
View ArticleIn the Fade
The revenge drama is a genre often anchored by male leads whose gruff visages peer out at you as they confidently stride away from explosions. Turkish/German director Fatih Akin isn’t interested in...
View ArticleDownsizing
The green-minded consumer may talk about reducing their carbon footprint, but to what lengths would they really go? Writer-director Alexander Payne’s sci-fi satire Downsizing proposes a world in which...
View ArticleInsidious: The Last Key
The Insidious series has played out like a trippier, lower-budget cousin to The Conjuring series. This makes sense, as the first two main entries of both series were directed by James Wan, who...
View ArticleHostiles
We all know the story. John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) told it, as did George Stevens’s Shane (1953). From Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns to genre-bending films like 2017’s R-rated Marvel vehicle...
View Article