Annihilation
Annihilation, writer-director Alex Garland’s gorgeous, terrifying, thought-provoking adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer’s lean, mean 2014 novel, is one of the best science fiction films of recent years....
View ArticleHannah
Hannah is an endeavor by a young Italian filmmaker to imitate Fellini and Antonioni, charting a visual poem about the paradox of loneliness and the inevitability of alienation in the modern city. In...
View ArticleNostalgia
Following in the footsteps of his last few films, Mark Pellington’s Nostalgia is a protracted rumination on the nature of grief and loss that’s more laborious than illuminating. Drawn from an...
View ArticleHalf Magic
Half Magic has the benefit of being released at the perfect time. The entertainment world is clamoring to celebrate #FemaleFilmmakers, although whether that actually translates into significant ticket...
View ArticleRediscover: D.O.A.: A Rite of Passage
From the distance of 40 years, it can be hard to comprehend just how little time it took for punk to change the face of popular music. The story of D.O.A., a landmark of punk cinema that recently made...
View ArticlePrimal Rage
Primal Rage, directed by Patrick Magee from a script co-written with Jay Lee, has a white people problem. The plot concerns Ashley and Max Carr (Casey Gagliardi and Andrew Joseph Montgomery) on the day...
View ArticleDid You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?
Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? has been released at the perfect time. Its themes of institutionalized racial violence, toxic masculinity and the impunity of white males in US society are firmly...
View ArticleFrom the Vaults of Streaming Hell: The Hallow
The Hallow, a genuinely freaky, Ireland-set haunted forest tale, is far better than what is suggested by the pulp-magazine style image that represents it in the Netflix horror section. Though it...
View ArticleDeath Wish
“Look at what these animals did to my baby,” says Dr. Paul Kersey (Bruce Willis) as he stands over the comatose body of his college-bound daughter, Jordan (Camila Morrone), referring to the three...
View ArticleOeuvre: Gilliam: The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
With his righteous battle against Universal Pictures over the U.S. edit of Brazil ending in victory and two surprise Academy Award nominations, Terry Gilliam was about to have another Hollywood moment,...
View ArticleRed Sparrow
Red Sparrow tangentially brings to mind Ninotchka, the 1939 American-made comedy that stars Greta Garbo as a Russian agent sent to Paris on official Soviet business. Though relatively acclaimed at the...
View ArticleThe Vanishing of Sidney Hall
It’s hard to recall a film whose ambitions are so diametrically opposed to the skill and imagination of its maker as The Vanishing of Sidney Hall. Lofty goals from a rookie auteur are nothing new to...
View ArticleGoldstone
Australian indigenous director Ivan Sen’s Goldstone mirrors the atmosphere of its namesake town, a dry, arid Outback locale with vast spans of nothingness lying between its threadbare structures....
View ArticleOh Lucy!
Buoyant here and bracing there, at times feather light and then dead serious, Oh Lucy! is a study in tonal contrasts. Atsuko Hirayanagi’s feature-length adaptation of her 2014 short of the same name...
View ArticleMidnighters
What would you do if you struck a pedestrian with your car in the middle of the night on a lonely stretch of highway outside the range of cell phone service? Midnighters isn’t particularly concerned...
View ArticleMohawk
Mohawk, the second film from horror director Ted Geoghegan (We Are Still Here), is a down and dirty chiller that illustrates the genre’s unique ability to channel and illustrate the awful truths of...
View ArticleSouvenir
Isabelle Huppert has acted in five or more films in each of the past two years. Few actors can boast such a string of roles, but Bavo Defurne’s Souvenir truly is the reminder that the goal should...
View ArticleCriminally Overrated: Superman: The Movie
In the ancient times of the 1970s, Marvel Comics was awful at translating its newsprint superheroes into live action franchises. Spider-man and the Hulk languished on network television, the former a...
View ArticleGringo
Some filmmakers populate their fictional narratives with unsavory characters in an attempt to create more realism, with the assumption that having a cast that’s too artificially likable is in some way...
View ArticleOeuvre: Gilliam: The Fisher King
Coming off the production nightmare that was The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Terry Gilliam sought to make a more stripped-down film. Working from a powerful script from screenwriter Richard...
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