The Midnight Man
Two young girls and a boy are gathered around candles that have just been extinguished, frantically trying to reignite them while counting to 10. They draw a circle of salt around them. The circle gets...
View ArticleMom and Dad
If cinema were a china shop, then Nicolas Cage is the bull. Even as he destroys and reconstructs the art of acting, time and time again, this anarchistic hurricane of a performer endlessly fascinates....
View ArticleHumor Me
The toothless comedy Humor Me offers two types of jokes: beige domestic banter about such insipid topics as the palatability of diet cream soda, and one characters’ off-color chestnuts about...
View ArticleCriminally Underrated: Underworld
We may not have appreciated it at the time, but the early 2000s were a golden age for female-led action films, including 2000’s Charlie’s Angels, 2001’s Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, 2002’s Resident Evil...
View ArticlePlease Stand By
As both medical understanding and cultural awareness about autism increases, individuals on the spectrum are also becoming increasingly visible in television and film. Whether the disorder is portrayed...
View ArticleAmerican Folk
Usually, elevator pitches for new movies are reductive simplifications, but the one for American Folk is right on the money. It’s basically Once but on 9/11. Just like that critically acclaimed, low-fi...
View ArticleKickboxer: Retaliation
When we reviewed Kickboxer: Vengeance, 2016’s modern remake of the Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle, our chief criticism was that Alain Moussi was a bland replacement as JCVD’s titular fighter Kurt Sloane...
View ArticleRevisit: Brokeback Mountain
Two articles published in the Guardian, about eight years apart, speak to Brokeback Mountain’s enduring legacy. The first was penned in 2006 by Annie Proulx, author of the New Yorker short story on...
View ArticleHave a Nice Day
As China continues to rapidly modernize, it’s massive population grows ever more acclimated to the fleeting thrills of getting and spending, furthering the awkward national transition from...
View ArticleJust Charlie
Just Charlie tells the story of Charlie Lyndsay (Harry Gilby) at the most difficult moment of his young life. A star footballer for his local club, Charlie has the opportunity to move up to a better...
View ArticleFrom the Vaults of Streaming Hell: Holidays
Even in the most capable hands, horror anthologies tend to suffer from tonal inconsistency, which is often overcompensated for with a contrived overarching theme. With the underwhelming XX (2017), it...
View ArticleBilal: A New Breed of Hero
Bilal: A New Breed of Hero, the largest-scale animated film ever produced in the Middle East, is a film that is easier to appreciate than enjoy. Occasionally beautiful, with a rousing but uneven story,...
View ArticleOeuvre: Gilliam: Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Terry Gilliam didn’t start out as a director or screenwriter, but an environment as loose as the set of Monty Python may have been the ideal place to learn. Originally an animator, Gilliam took on the...
View ArticleBraven
Somewhere between the swaggering everyman pulp of Walking Tall and the claustrophobic brutality of Straw Dogs, you’ll find the serviceably entertaining Braven, a straightforward vehicle for Jason...
View ArticleScorched Earth
The next time someone tells you the Western is dead you can hit him with a big old bag of dystopian science fiction movies. The Western aesthetic has been so thoroughly absorbed by science fiction that...
View ArticleRediscover: Christmas in July
Preston Sturges’ 1940 comedy Christmas in July is a 68-minute, screwball opera of assumptions. A trio of office workers assume that their light-hearted joke will play out just fine. A narrow-minded...
View ArticleA Fantastic Woman
Sebastián Leilo’s A Fantastic Woman opens as an extended ellipsis, allowing its characters to gradually coalesce into being. We see Orlando (Francisco Reyes), an older gentleman, enter a café one night...
View ArticlePeter Rabbit
Peter Rabbit, a hybrid live-action/CGI adaption of Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit, is enjoyable but lightweight, most notable for its above average special effects and meta approach to its...
View ArticleHoly Hell! The Thin Red Line Turns 20
Film director and WWII vet Samuel Fuller infamously derided the overwhelming majority of war movies, including and especially the ones that professed to be anti-war, as little more than “recruitment...
View ArticleOeuvre: Gilliam: Jabberwocky
After the success of Monty Python and the Holy Grail Terry Gilliam’s first directing job wasn’t going to be Jabberwocky. Producer Sandy Lieberson had hired Gilliam to direct and animate a project...
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