Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, the fourth sequel to 1993’s Jurassic Park and the second in three years, is a pale, cynical echo of Steven Spielberg’s original blockbuster. Though several of Fallen...
View ArticleDamsel
The latest from brothers David and Nathan Zellner, Damsel, is a visually impressive reinvention of the Western. Boasting pitch-perfect postcard landscapes, an evocative score, beautiful lead actors and...
View ArticleIzzy Gets the Fuck Across Town
More a series of vignettes than a meaningful narrative, Izzy Gets the Fuck Across Town mirrors the episodic nature of its protagonist’s approach to her own life. A couch-surfing, starving-artist...
View ArticleRevisit: My Favorite Year
With all the reboots, re-imaginings, remakes, comic book movies and Star Wars features filling the multiplexes near you, pop culture feels like a self-consuming serpent feeding on nostalgia. Serious...
View ArticleThe King
At its outset, Eugene Jarecki’s The King presents two entwined subjects that have been exhaustively covered. One is the lasting meaning of Elvis Presley as the dominant mythological figure of...
View ArticleThe Catcher Was a Spy
In a landscape where stating how bad Nazis are has somehow become a controversial statement, Hollywood’s tired obsession with WWII has the potential to function better now than in years past. Decades...
View ArticleHoly Hell! Rushmore Turns 20
Rushmore is now five years older than its protagonist, the sometimes brilliant and regularly acerbic Max Fischer. Played by Jason Schwartzman, Max is a prep-school dilettante par excellence, one who...
View ArticleOeuvre: Brooks: The Twelve Chairs
VHS copies of Mel Brooks’ second feature, The Twelve Chairs, abound on Amazon and eBay like tombstones from the last time a company mass-produced it. The movie is currently unavailable on home video...
View ArticleSicario: Day of the Soldado
Like many of Denis Villeneuve’s films, Sicario presented a convoluted narrative masking an even more complex moral quandary that ultimately resolved into a simplistic yet contradictory fable. In its...
View ArticleLeave No Trace
Eight years ago, director Debra Granik blew audiences away (and gave us Jennifer Lawrence) with Winter’s Bone, the story of an Appalachian teenager driven to support her siblings in any way possible....
View ArticleDark River
In her innovative documentary The Arbor and feature adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Selfish Giant, director Clio Barnard vividly captured the working class of Bradford in Northern England. Her latest...
View ArticleWoman Walks Ahead
Can a film be well performed, beautifully shot, passionately written and competently directed, but still be an absolute bore? In director Susanna White’s Woman Walks Ahead, that appears to be the case....
View ArticleThe First Purge
The problem with The Purge franchise is that for three films—with slight positive exceptions in sophomore effort The Purge: Anarchy (2014)—an immensely smart idea has been executed with baffling...
View ArticleThree Identical Strangers
Three Identical Strangers is a one-of-a-kind documentary that shifts gears and detours so often that, by its end, the winding path we travel leads straight into jaw-dropping revelations, unanswered...
View ArticleWhitney
Director Kevin Macdonald has a deft hand for tragedy. His 1999 documentary One Day in September, which won him an Oscar, tells the bleak story of the athletes murdered at the 1972 Olympic Games in...
View ArticleSorry to Bother You
The sharpness of contemporary digital images is particularly pronounced in Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You. The intensity of the image detail combines with the mostly static images to emphasize the...
View ArticleAnt-Man and the Wasp
Let’s pause and reflect that there is now an Ant-Man franchise. What that says about the state of Hollywood’s rampant sequel culture, and the total dominance of superhero pictures, is up for debate....
View ArticleBleeding Steel
For all its flaws, the loopier-than-usual Jackie Chan vehicle Bleeding Steel deserves at least one honorary award: Most Outstanding Deployment of the Dramatic Device Known as Chekhov’s Teddy Bear....
View ArticleUnder the Tree
It is easy to decipher the intentions of Under the Tree, and its screen cultural reference points are readily apparent as well. It is a black comedy satirizing the vagaries and ennui of contemporary...
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Revisit: Vampyr
Can you imagine a time when vampires were fresh on the big screen? An era before Lestat, Twilight and numerous Dracula films, when the mystery of the undead still surprised and frightened? Vampirism...
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