Revisit: The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension
It’s easy to forget how wonderfully weird big studio filmmaking could be in the 1980s. Memory leans toward the ubiquitous Amblin Entertainment logo and excessive lens flares, but some wildly original...
View ArticleRelaxer
There’s no mistaking a Joel Potrykus movie or a Joshua Burge performance. In the 2010 Super 8 short “Coyote,” 2012’s Ape and the 2014 feature Buzzard, the director and his favorite actor completed an...
View ArticleFrom the Vaults of Streaming Hell: Zoo in Budapest
The rivers of our streaming services are swollen with VOD product aimed at the animal lover. From Wild About Animals: Baby Animals to Animal Bloopers to Animals Are Amazing—and that’s just from the...
View ArticleWhite Chamber
Ever since the Enola Gay dropped the instrument of mass death code-named “Little Boy” on Hiroshima in August 1945, our shared global society has become increasingly eschatological in its imagination....
View ArticleThe Brink
Setting aside the debate about whether deplatforming white nationalists like Steve Bannon should extend to documentaries about them, The Brink is a tight, fly-on-the-wall look at the vilified politico...
View ArticleOeuvre: Carpenter: They Live
So much of <em>They Live</em>’s surface level iconography has seeped into the pop cultural consciousness that its politics seem quickly forgotten. After the existential horror of...
View ArticlePet Sematary
The first film adaptation of Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, penned by the bestselling horror maestro himself, exists in a liminal space between more artistic renderings of his work like De Palma’s Carrie...
View ArticleShazam!
Doubling down on the newfound formula that propelled Aquaman to global box office success, Shazam! helps the DCEU move even further away from Marvel’s paradigm, delivering a heartfelt family film with...
View ArticleThe Public
There’s a certain brand of Hollywood liberal—a phrase to which I hate to give much credence—who labors to convince us they are indeed helping. They make sure to be photographed at the right events,...
View ArticleHigh Life
Like the best prose, the work of Claire Denis isn’t the easiest to translate. In her latest, High Life, the pieces are there for us to assemble, but it’s a jigsaw puzzle of themes, moods and narrative...
View ArticleThe Wind
The Wind, director Emma Tammi’s taut feature debut from a lean script by Teresa Sutherland (also a debut), is a natural entry into the vital, if understocked, horror-Western subgenre. The film’s...
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Revist: Andrei Rublev
The deepest felt films are often the most harrowing. In Tree of Life (2011) Terrence Malick examined the constant conflict of grace versus nature. Do we follow the way of grace and tap into inner...
View ArticleThe Haunting of Sharon Tate
Writer-director Daniel Farrands’ The Haunting of Sharon Tate is destined to become a VOD-dare for the kind of movie-watcher who likes to smell a carton of spoiled milk out of curiosity. As far as...
View ArticleCriminally Underrated: Cast a Deadly Spell
Film noir, as a genre, is the pineapple juice of the cinematic cocktail world. You can add it to any concoction and the whole affair just gets sweeter. Few films exemplify this maxim like HBO’s 1991...
View ArticleSauvage
The recent death of French auteur Agnès Varda, despite her long life, devastated many cinephiles. Varda worked right until the end of her 90 years; her 2017 documentary Faces Places racked up awards...
View ArticleOeuvre: Carpenter: Memoirs of an Invisible Man
For better or worse, most John Carpenter movies bear a distinct individual stamp, with certain ideas and images appearing again and again, marking the majority of his oeuvre with an immediately...
View ArticleMaster Z: Ip Man Legacy
Even ostensible biopics are getting the franchise treatment nowadays, as Wilson Yip’s Ip Man series has begat the curious “side-quel” adventure Master Z: Ip Man Legacy. With series’ fight...
View ArticleHellboy
It’s a depressing testament to the superhero economy that there’s already a reboot of the Hellboy franchise. On paper, swapping Ron Perlman for “Stranger Things” star David Harbour, and Academy Award...
View ArticleDogman
Some story templates are so ancient they become so immediate and visceral we know them in our bones. When we hear such stories, our enjoyment is related more to the context—setting, details and...
View ArticleMary Magdalene
Mary Magdalene is a work of revisionism that scarcely revises anything. Its opening images present a vision of ancient Israel as a harsh place of infertile land where life is hard. A scene of...
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