Pacific Rim: Uprising
Guillermo Del Toro’s 2013 fantasy Pacific Rim was an imperfect film, but one forgave its flaws in light of pulling off such a unique vision within the paradigm of a big budget studio blockbuster....
View ArticleFinal Portrait
As typically illustrated on celluloid, the painter’s palette is imagined as a vibrant creative conduit, a channel from which color – and by extension life, passion and conflict – springs copiously....
View ArticleThe Workshop
The Workshop establishes an exciting premise, setting and characters that promise metafictional chicanery and a deep examination of the current global political moment, but then reneges on the...
View ArticleRediscover: Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael
Of all of Winona Ryder’s late ’80s and early ‘90s film’s, Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael is perhaps most often forgotten, not getting credit for helping to establish her eccentric, weird girl persona....
View ArticleStatus Update
A Disney Channel star and a director whose best work may have been in the Step Up franchise combine for a coming-of-age tale about an awkward teen whose life is changed after he meets a genie with a...
View ArticleIsle of Dogs
Japan’s kawaii aesthetic would so naturally lend itself to Wes Anderson’s twee sensibilities that it’s a wonder he doesn’t indulge more deeply in the island nation’s “culture of cuteness” in his second...
View ArticleCriminally Underrated: Any Given Sunday
Over the past few years, the undeniable ugliness at the core of the NFL has been more and more difficult for even casual fans of football to ignore. The widening chasm between the sport itself and the...
View ArticleReady Player One
Toward the end of Ernest Cline’s 2011 science-fiction novel Ready Player One, our hero faces a challenge. He must recite the dialogue of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. All of it – from the species of...
View ArticleFinding Your Feet
“It’s one thing being scared of dying, Sandra. It’s a whole different matter being scared of living.” That’s the level of self-help discourse that veteran British actors are left to utter in the...
View ArticleOeuvre: Gilliam: The Brothers Grimm
For Terry Gilliam, a director famed for his “Trilogy of Imagination,” classic fairy tales were always an inevitable subject. In the hands of the creator of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, about the...
View ArticleLove After Love
An angry yet quiet exploration of the consequences of grief, Russell Harbaugh’s directorial debut, Love After Love, deserves a larger audience than such a small film will probably find. While hardly a...
View ArticleThe China Hustle
Part of the reason why Wall Street has as much unregulated free reign as it does is because the population at large has very little understanding of the sketchy deals that are potentially going to...
View ArticleBirthmarked
With all the news of hacking going on these days, Birthmarked might make you wonder if Wes Anderson’s hard drive has been compromised. Written by Marc Tulin and directed by Emanuel Hoss-Desmarais, the...
View ArticleAll I Wish
All I Wish works very well as a showcase for the too-little-seen Sharon Stone and other supporting players but unfortunately offers little else. The problem here seems to be one of ambition; while the...
View ArticleHoly Hell! The Big Lebowski Turns 20
Two years after Brainerd police chief Marge Gunderson declared that “there’s more to life than a little money, you know,” Joel and Ethan Coen veered away from the bleak subject matter and stark tundra...
View ArticleOeuvre: Gilliam: Tideland
Tideland marks Terry Gilliam’s move into what should be a fitting subgenre: Southern gothic magic realism. Its heroine, Jeliza-Rose (Jodelle Ferland), is a prepubescent girl who lives out in the...
View ArticleBlockers
Broad comedy may be the trickiest popcorn genre to nail. You could count on two hands good-to-great examples from the last ten years: Girls Trip, Spy, Trainwreck, Bridesmaids, Superbad and the...
View ArticleA Quiet Place
Sound is everything in horror. With a creak of the floorboards, it teases that unseen thing around the corner. With a heart-racing jolt in the score accompanying a shocking image on screen, the classic...
View ArticleChappaquiddick
Based on the abundance of biographies, television series and movies that are made about them today, there’s no doubt the Kennedys remain as enigmatic as they did when they were alive. Where people are...
View ArticleYou Were Never Really Here
The slick, A24-esque marketing for Lynne Ramsay’s latest film, You Were Never Really Here seems designed to attract a certain kind of art bro, the kind of person with Nicolas Refn’s Drive firmly...
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