Lizzie
The surging popularity of the true crime genre and macabre murder stories in general has taken us to many an inevitable destination The latest stop in our ongoing obsession is the tale of...
View ArticleCriminally Underrated: Constantine
In 2005, the boom of comic book movies consumed Hollywood with every studio plundering available properties for the next big thing. Warner Brothers, a subsidiary of Time/Warner along with DC comics,...
View ArticleLost Child
Lost Child, directed and co-written by Ramaa Mosley, opens on a young Army veteran, Fern (Leven Rambin), riding a bus through an increasingly isolated rural American landscape. The long tracking shots...
View ArticleOeuvre: Weerasethakul: Mysterious Object at Noon
The contemporary art-cinema food chain, through which a world’s worth of movies are filtered into festival contention and then absorbed into the diffuse bloodstream of international distribution, is by...
View ArticleThe House with a Clock in Its Walls
When the name Eli Roth slithers onto the screen, moviegoers can usually expect a couple hours full of dismemberment, torture and other creative ways of torturing scantily-clad twentysomethings. But...
View ArticleLove, Gilda
Of all the “Saturday Night Live” comedians who have died young, Gilda Radner’s life feels the most tragic. Whereas Belushi and Farley were cut down by their own excesses and Phil Hartman was killed...
View ArticleTea With The Dames
Directed by Roger Michell, the documentary Tea With The Dames features four of the great ladies of British theater and film, Dames Eileen Atkins, Judi Dench, Joan Plowright and Maggie Smith, in...
View ArticleThe Last Suit
The Holocaust and its immense horror has been a cinematic subject for 70 years, to the point that, functionally, it is its own genre. As with any other genre, the Holocaust film genre has spawned a...
View ArticleRevisit: The Third Man
The Third Man is undeniably one of the best and most highly acclaimed films of the ‘40s as well as being among the greatest British films ever produced (it is rated the third highest film from the UK...
View ArticleThe Song of Sway Lake
Filmmaker Ari Gold first popped on the scene with Adventures of Power, a cult comedy about the world of competitive air guitaring, so he’s no stranger to curious film premises. But his latest, The Song...
View ArticleColette
Wash Westmoreland, the director of the new biopic of the French writer and provocateur Colette, had an excellent and relatively underreported career as a director of gay pornographic films under the...
View ArticleHoly Hell: Halloween H20: 20 Years Later Is 20 Years Old!
David Gordon Green’s upcoming Halloween is being billed as both a direct sequel to the 1978 original, jettisoning the other sequels and remakes from the series’ canonical timeline, as well as a 40th...
View ArticleOeuvre: Weerasethakul: Blissfully Yours
Blissfully Yours begins in much the same docu-fiction format that characterized Mysterious Object at Noon. Min (Min Oo) is being examined by a doctor as his two female companions, girlfriend Roong...
View ArticleThe Sisters Brothers
For his first English-language feature film, French director Jacques Audiard turned to a quintessential American genre: the western. Based on the novel by Patrick deWitt, The Sisters Brothers is being...
View ArticleNight School
Hot on the heels of Girls Trip’s success, director Malcolm D. Lee re-teams with that film’s breakout star Tiffany Haddish for this intermittently humorous but largely messy comedy twofer. Night School...
View ArticleQuincy
Two hours doesn’t feel like nearly enough time to properly chronicle the life of a giant like Quincy Jones. The man is one of the most interesting and accomplished artistic figures of the 20th century...
View ArticleMatangi/Maya/M.I.A.
Matangi “Maya” Arulpragasam, a.k.a. M.I.A., has been a heavily scrutinized figure almost since the release of her debut album, and the contradictions between her Tamil background, London coming-of-age...
View ArticleBad Reputation
An inspiration to generations of aspiring female rockers, her career mirroring a time of volatile cultural shifts, Joan Jett is a great subject for a music documentary. Unfortunately, in much the way...
View ArticleAll About Nina
Meltdowns behind the mic have become almost inevitable in feature films about stand-up comics, and Eva Vives’ All About Nina clearly barrels toward such an emotional purge from the start. The eponymous...
View ArticleRediscover: The Spook Who Sat by the Door
Prior to spawning James Bond with 1953’s Casino Royale, Ian Fleming spent a long stint in British Naval Intelligence, establishing the cloak-and-dagger bona fides that would help him create a...
View Article