Criminally Underrated: The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
When he set out to direct The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, it was clear that Tommy Lee Jones viewed it as a political effort, and he likely also understood that its topic of immigration is...
View ArticleThe Wild Pear Tree
As Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s aesthetic scope broadens, his films ironically get smaller. Winter Sleep concentrated the sprawl of Once Upon a Time in Anatolia’s crime drama into the dark family comedy of...
View ArticleMiss Bala
Catherine Hardwicke is one of the more prolific female directors working today. Unfortunately, directors who happen to be women are often held to a much higher standard than their male peers, and many...
View ArticleOeuvre: Carpenter: Halloween
John Carpenter’s Halloween is arguably the filmmaker’s most profound work, digging into themes that are rarely explored within the vast collection of sequel-spawning slasher origin films. In 1978,...
View ArticleBraid
Touted as the first movie funded entirely by cryptocurrency, writer-director Mitzi Peirone’s Braid is a startling first feature that has a lot more going for it than its unusual bankroll. The movie...
View ArticleVelvet Buzzsaw
Dan Gilroy’s directorial debut Nightcrawler was a crime drama exploring the intersection between capitalism and media, while his less well-received follow-up Roman J. Israel, Esq was a legal thriller...
View ArticlePiercing
When Christopher Abbott vacated his role as Charlie on “Girls” at the end of its popular second season, the projects he took on set himself apart from his peers. Gravitating towards stage work and...
View ArticleRediscover: Star 80
What drew Bob Fosse, legendary choreographer and director of movie musicals such as Cabaret and All That Jazz, to the lurid true crime story of Dorothy Stratten, the Playmate of the Year murdered by...
View ArticleThe Unicorn
Unwilling or unable to consider society’s broader ills, there remains a subset of filmmakers who have turned their attention forever inward. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this approach. Some...
View ArticleThe Saint Bernard Syndicate
The last thing you would call The Saint Bernard Syndicate is cuddly. In this satire from director Mads Brügger, the star breed, previously featured in such family-friendly diversions as Beethoven, is...
View ArticleDaughter of Mine
In many coming-of-age stories, there is often some terrifying, physical challenge that the protagonist must overcome as a rite of passage. Sometimes, it is fairly ordinary, as with the basement furnace...
View ArticleHoly Hell! Bringing Out the Dead Turns 20
Sandwiched between the divisive Kundun and the long gestating Gangs of New York in his filmography, Martin Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead remains a terminally underrated work for the director....
View ArticleOeuvre: Carpenter: Elvis
In John Carpenter’s early milestone Halloween, he captured a villain that never dies. For the misguided rush job biopic Elvis, he failed to resurrect the King of Rock ’n‘ Roll. But the TV movie...
View ArticleArctic
Arctic marks the latest iteration of a timeless tale that goes back to Robinson Crusoe, if not The Odyssey. Man is pitted against nature in a fight for survival, a relentless struggle against the...
View ArticleThe Lego Movie 2: The Second Part
Everything’s not awesome. Well, maybe for the characters of the first Lego Movie who now face an apocalyptic situation when a marauding band of Duplos have invaded their world. Emmet (Chris Pratt),...
View ArticleCold Pursuit
In recent years, the expectations for a Liam Neeson vehicle have remained static, catering to the same specific intersection between an audience’s lust for violence and their desire for the purveyor of...
View ArticleLords of Chaos
Of all the bands enmeshed in the infamy of Norway’s early black metal scene, none retain more notoriety than Mayhem, a group so steeped in innovation and horror that the genre is permanently entwined...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Revisit: A Matter of Life and Death
Which title do you prefer? After debuting in England as A Matter of Life and Death, American moviegoers bought tickets to Stairway to Heaven, the safer name for Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s...
View ArticleHappy Death Day 2U
2017’s surprise hit Happy Death Day was a laugh-out-loud funny and, at times, genuinely scary horror comedy that did a particularly good job of selling its Groundhog Day-style premise. And while that...
View ArticleFrom the Vaults of Streaming Hell: Frequently Asked Questions about Time Travel
Director Gareth Carrivick’s 2009 sci-fi comedy is the sort of self-aware product you watch when you can’t watch Edgar Wright’s celebrated Cornetto Trilogy. And with time travel tropes replacing...
View Article