Ash Is Purest White
From the outset of his career, Jia Zhangke has steadily developed a core theme of charting China’s progress from emergent communist superpower to its present-day purgatorial stance between state...
View ArticleTriple Frontier
On paper, blending the action aesthetics of a war film with the structural functions of a heist thriller should result in a satisfying and flashy genre exercise. But J.C. Chandor’s Triple Frontier, the...
View ArticleRediscover: 8 Million Ways to Die
Beloved directors rarely possess filmographies that conclude on an upswing, but few final films have quite the air of tragedy and disappointment as Hal Ashby’s 8 Million Ways to Die. The 1986 film was...
View ArticleKnife + Heart
Yann Gonzalez’s Knife + Heart is a queer parody of a sexual thriller, but unfortunately one that doesn’t manage to be funny, sexy or particularly thrilling. Gonzalez sets his film in 1979 and appears...
View ArticleCriminally Underrated: The Lookout
What do we talk about when we discuss the great crime-centric cinema of the 21st century? The opening sequence of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008)? Martin Scorsese’s The Departed (2006) is on...
View ArticleThe Hummingbird Project
The Hummingbird Project is the first in what might be a burgeoning film genre: the high-frequency trade thriller. In HFT, teeny tiny shares are bought and sold in the blink of an eye by a complex...
View ArticleThe Aftermath
When you get bored during the post- WWII drama The Aftermath, it’s fun to imagine what the film would be like if it were written as a trashy beach read that middle-aged housewives would pick up at...
View ArticleOeuvre: Carpenter: Big Trouble in Little China
John Carpenter played such an important role in genre filmmaking that it’s difficult to believe that so many of his classics failed with audiences and critics. Big Trouble in Little China continued...
View ArticleUs
Though not quite as timely or cohesive as his debut, Jordan Peele’s Us, the hotly anticipated follow-up to Get Out, is an impressive sophomore effort which expands upon the appeal of his prior film...
View ArticleOut of Blue
Adapted from a Martin Amis novel that is reportedly a parody of American crime fiction, Out of Blue, written and directed by Carol Morley, is a maudlin, incoherent snooze of a thriller that takes...
View ArticleTriple Threat
With all the (warranted) debate surrounding the WGA’s battle against the agencies of “packaging” practices, it’s easy to forget that on occasion, just shoving the right stars together at the right time...
View ArticleWorking Woman
The centuries-long drive for gender equality (and, today, gender expression equality, too) has faced resistance of many kinds. So has every movement for social justice. Among the more insidious forms...
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Revisit: Pet Sematary
In narrative cinematic art, an unwillingness to accept death is generally depicted as an ideal. The cancer patient clings to life, undergoing invasive and potentially useless treatment; the war hero...
View ArticleDragged Across Concrete
In S. Craig Zahler’s debut film, 2015’s Bone Tomahawk, the writer/director made an immediate statement with a boldly directed western that probed the psyche of man and the nature of violence. 2017’s...
View ArticleHotel Mumbai
We are living in an age of what feels like near-constant terror attacks on a global scale, from the coordinated attacks of extremist groups to the domestic terrorism of shootings at schools and other...
View ArticleHoly Hell! The Blair Witch Project Turns 20
In 1999, nobody had seen anything like The Blair Witch Project before. Sure, epistolary storytelling within the horror genre dates back at least as far as Bram Stoker. And within cinema, the found...
View ArticleOeuvre: Carpenter: Prince of Darkness
After a number of increasingly high-profile, (relatively) high-budget features, John Carpenter got back to basics with Prince of Darkness, another of his bottle-episode narratives that uses a single...
View ArticleDumbo
You can say this about Tim Burton’s live-action remake of the 1941 animated classic Dumbo: there’s nary a single racist bird in sight. This notable omission marks a genuine improvement on the beloved,...
View ArticleDiane
Critic and programmer Kent Jones’s narrative debut, Diane, is a humble character study that contains vast depths of observation. Its eponymous figure (Mary Kay Place) is a widow entering her senior...
View ArticleA Vigilante
Following a chilling voiceover of a frightened woman organizing a takedown of her abusive husband, the blandly titled A Vigilante opens with Olivia Wilde’s vengeance-minded protagonist rapidly and...
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