The Other Story
In terms of narrative scope, production values and dialogue construction, The Other Story comes across less as a film and more like the Season Two finale of a basic cable teen melodrama, something like...
View ArticleThe Queen
With Pride Month having drawn to a close and all the opportunistic rainbow-laden coffee cups safely in the trash bin, it’s a good time to give Frank Simon’s documentary The Queen another look,...
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Revisit: Blue Velvet
To land the frightening villain role in David Lynch’s fourth feature film, a fresh-out-of-rehab Dennis Hopper famously called up the director and declared, “I have to play Frank Booth, because I am...
View ArticleOphelia
Alternative takes on classic material are always welcome when they offer a unique perspective, but they’re also a high-wire act beset on all sides by traps, constantly one false move away from...
View ArticleRay & Liz
In Ray & Liz, images are constantly being divided. The film is full of windows: people leaning their heads or dropping things out of them, curtains shielding their light, dismal views of rainy...
View ArticleCold Blood
Hitman movies have coasted on fumes for years, the limited applicability of the existential reveries of those who make a living by taking life having long ago been exhausted and the bleakly comic...
View ArticleHoly Hell! eXistenZ Turns 20
Ten years before Roger Ebert was wrong about video games not being art and 20 years before the gamers still mad about his article began to spend actual cash money to buy and drink a Twitch streamer’s...
View ArticleOeuvre: Varda: The Creatures
Agnès Varda’s fourth film, 1966’s The Creatures, is one of her most ambitious but least lauded. Starring acclaimed French thespians Catherine Deneuve and Michel Piccoli as fictional island dwellers...
View ArticleStuber
What if a mild-mannered Uber driver (Kumail Nanjiani) has his vehicle commandeered by a detective (Dave Bautista) who is after the man who killed his partner? What if we had the detective be...
View ArticleDarlin’
Following in the footsteps of two prior quasi-related horror films, actress Pollyanna McIntosh moves from in front of the camera to the director’s chair for Darlin’, a curious genre experiment further...
View ArticleThe Art of Self-Defense
One of the more alarming trends of the past decade is that mainstream cultural consumption—including US politics, whose baroque fakery and posturing amounts to entertainment for consumer-voters—has...
View ArticleRevisit: Legally Blonde
“Don’t be scared. Everyone will love you.” This is the advice Elle Woods (Reese Witherspoon) gives her pet Chihuahua, Bruiser Woods, as the two of them arrive at Harvard ready to tackle law school....
View ArticleSword of Trust
A good TV sitcom expertly strings viewers along through sharp characterization, predictable-yet-still-funny jokes and an underlying social consciousness that occasionally comes to the fore. They are...
View ArticleFrom the Vaults of Streaming Hell: Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome
While this column regularly highlights the worst you can stream, this week we present some hope for free content with one of the most celebrated crime franchises: Dick Tracy. Created by cartoonist...
View ArticleRojo
Your opinion of writer/director Benjamin Naishtat’s new film Rojo will depend on your feelings about heavy-handed symbolism. Set in Argentina in the mid-‘70s, the film deals with the human and societal...
View ArticleOeuvre: Varda: Far from Vietnam
From the beginning, Agnès Varda’s work has been focused both communally and cooperatively, adopting a street-level entanglement in social spheres that frequently causes the films themselves to reflect...
View ArticleThe Farewell
In tackling the complexity of grief and the nature of reconciling with death, The Farewell finds fertile ground for both tragedy and comedy. It is at once a somber rumination on family dynamics and a...
View ArticleThe Lion King
“The Circle of Life” isn’t just the majestic opening number to a beloved film. It’s also a business strategy, one that’s raking in cash and growing increasingly tedious. Much like a Play-Doh...
View ArticleRosie
If more people could conceptualize homelessness beyond the reductive imagery of vagrants in tattered rags reaching up at them, asking for change from a pile of blankets on unforgiving concrete, perhaps...
View ArticleLuz
Imagine a nightmare fermented in the mind of a coke addict–a pseudo intellectual fever dream of a movie. That’s the gist of Luz, the feature debut from young German writer-director Tilman Singer. Yet...
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