From the Vaults of Streaming Hell: Santa’s Summer House
If you think that nothing says Christmas Movie like a 10-minute game of croquet, then you must be familiar with the work of VOD auteur David DeCoteau. Yet, despite flashes of the cheap madness that can...
View ArticleClara’s Ghost
Writer-director Bridey Elliott’s feature debut Clara’s Ghost stages a tense dinner at which a frustrated middle-aged mother tells her family to stop making fun of her. What makes the scenario more...
View ArticleVox Lux
In a year where Bradley Cooper’s A Star is Born remake tackles musical fame as a Hollywood throwback tragedy, Brady Corbet’s Vox Lux comes at the problem from an altogether different direction, To...
View ArticleBack Roads
In the thriller genre, there are two radically different approaches to setting. One is to the eschew specificity completely and just have the characters shoot, car-chase and have sex with each other in...
View ArticleMowgli: Legend of the Jungle
Long gestating in production hell, Andy Serkis’s Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle has the misfortune of finally premiering in the wake of Jon Favreau’s own CGI-heavy update of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle...
View ArticleAmazing Grace
Originally planned to promote the gospel album culled from Aretha Franklin’s performances at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in the Watts district of Los Angeles, Sydney Pollack’s Amazing...
View ArticleCentral Park
An unsuccessful mélange of post-economic meltdown drama and slasher film, Central Park throws a timely motivation into the old serial killer psychology: financial ruin. Yet while his young cast is...
View ArticleMortal Engines
Though Peter Jackson’s name only appears in the producer credit of Christian Rivers’s Mortal Engines, the film bears all the worst attributes of his blockbuster filmmaking. Set in a post-apocalyptic...
View ArticleSpider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
As more and more blockbusters adapted from superhero comics come to rely on intermittently believable CGI to bridge the gap between the real world and the fantastical elements of the source material,...
View ArticleRust Creek
The protagonist of Jen McGowan’s Rust Creek is so thinly sketched she’s difficult to root for, even as lecherous hillbillies chase her through the woods. Our introduction to Sawyer (Hermione Corfield)...
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Rediscover: El Sur
Of all the 20th century’s major conflicts, the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) is likely the least represented, cinematically speaking. Although there are a handful of great films that tackle the...
View ArticleRoma
Alfonso Cuarón’s latest triumph Roma is at once personal and sociological, individual and universal, intimate and sweeping. These polar forces don’t act in opposition; they interlock with magnetic...
View ArticleVice
Former Vice President Dick Cheney isn’t a particularly strong candidate for a good biopic, if only because he makes for such an unrelatable and profoundly unlikable protagonist. But rather than try to...
View ArticleFrom the Vaults of Streaming Hell: Mahabharat
In late August 2018, as yet another bizarre bubble simmered to the top of the cultural boil, the meme-o-sphere was treated to the escapades of Johnny and Papa, a father-son duo engaged in a series of...
View ArticleDestroyer
After an unjust number of years spent in director jail for the failure of Aeon Flux, the taut thriller The Invitation put Karyn Kusama back on the map. Her follow-up, Destroyer, penned by the same...
View ArticleOeuvre: Carpenter: Dark Star
John Carpenter’s feature-length directorial debut, 1974’s Dark Star was released smack dab in the middle of the second golden age of sci-fi filmmaking. It is the rare film that successfully draws upon...
View ArticleThe Upside
As flat, cheap, artificial, inconsequential, disposable and overly-sentimental as a Hallmark card your grandmother gives you for your birthday, The Upside is a new film marketed as “a comedic look” at...
View ArticleTouch Me Not
Adina Pintilie’s Touch Me Not opens like a parody of European sexual dramas. While a soft focus close-up highlights the body hair of a man as the camera gently moves from his stomach up to his face, a...
View ArticleCapernaum
A beautifully ugly film featuring a Dickensian story and excellent central performances, Lebanese filmmaker Nadine Labaki’s Capernaum would be nearly perfect if Labaki approached its plot with the...
View ArticleBuffalo Boys
A film form nearly as old as the medium itself, the Western has by now been through more than a dozen different permutations spanning around the globe. A rough, incomplete chronology might trace the...
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