Revisit: Death on the Nile
With the impending release of Rian Johnson’s Knives Out and production ramping up for Kenneth Branagh’s next Poirot flick, whodunnits are back in style. What better time than now to revisit the last...
View ArticleA Faithful Man
In the opening minutes of A Faithful Man, the latest from actor-director Louis Garrel, an efficient and masterfully simple scene plays out. A woman named Marianne (Laetitia Casta) tells her longtime...
View ArticleAt War
As At War begins, with news footage and voiceover setting the stage for a true-sounding story about a French manufacturing plant being shut down by the German multinational that owns it, the viewer...
View ArticleHoly Hell! The Matrix Turns 20
Carrie-Anne Moss, clad in skintight leather, froze in midair, her right leg poised to strike. Up to that second, the mise-en-scene of The Matrix is a mashup of ‘90s action stemming from kung fu...
View ArticleOeuvre: Varda: Uncle Yanco and Black Panthers
In the late ‘60s, Agnès Varda and her husband Jacques Demy relocated to California. The reasons behind the move are somewhat mysterious. Some say that they traveled there to promote Varda’s recent...
View ArticleOnce Upon a Time…In Hollywood
There are some tragedies that Hollywood just cannot shake. Be it the drowning death of Natalie Wood or Heath Ledger’s overdose, the catastrophic tales of people who made it to the top in a town known...
View ArticleSkin
Though the true events on which the film is based took place nearly 15 years ago, our current cultural climate—where bigotry and hatred is emboldened by racist vitriol trickling down from the highest...
View ArticleThe Best Movie Monster Ever: The Xenomorph Queen from Aliens
The best movie monster doesn’t even need to exist. Aliens, James Cameron’s bigger, action-forward 1986 sequel to Ridley Scott’s 1979 space horror classic, fulfilled the requirements of its title simply...
View ArticleThe Mountain
For all of the conservative wistfulness for the 1950s as a time of prosperity and happiness, time has increasingly revealed the dark underbelly of the era, the unprocessed trauma of World War II that...
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Revisit: In the Heat of the Night
The set-up seems familiar. A wealthy man is found murdered in a Southern town, his head bashed in and money stolen. The police scramble to find the killer. They immediately bring in an African-American...
View ArticleJirga
So much of the modern war film genre seems to focus exclusively on the pervasive image of a sullen white veteran struggling back at home, his story of guilt and regret completely untethered from the...
View ArticleHoly Hell! Julien Donkey-Boy Turns 20
Harmony Korine may be the most empathetic filmmaker America ever produced. This is especially true of his early films, which present the abandoned detritus of the American Dream: impoverished,...
View ArticleHoneyland
There’s a principle repeated over and over throughout the duration of Honeyland: Balance. When we first observe the film’s key figure, Macedonian beekeeper Hatidze Muratova, tending to her beehive, she...
View ArticleOeuvre: Varda: Lions Love (…and Lies)
The final film of Agnès Varda’s first California foray, 1969’s Lions Love (…and Lies) is at once her most traditional and experimental film of this brief phase. While it is the only feature-length film...
View ArticleFast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw
It’s a miracle that the Fast & Furious franchise has endured this long, but it seems even more shocking that Hobbs & Shaw is its first official spin-off. From the moment The Rock’s Luke Hobbs...
View ArticleThem That Follow
Religious indoctrination shapes thoughts and behavior more profoundly than perhaps any other social construct. When concentrated in isolated communities, these potent notions of supernatural...
View ArticleThe Nightingale
Is The Nightingale the first film with press notes that include trigger warnings? Jennifer Kent’s revenge movie more or less checks each box (murder, rape, infanticide), its 137 minutes filled with...
View ArticleJay Myself
With Jay Myself, first-time director Stephen Wilkes has made a film that, much like the latest revisionist history from movie veteran Quentin Tarantino, wistfully captures the end of an era in a...
View ArticleTel Aviv on Fire
With reality feeling increasingly like political satire every day, the ambitious Israeli film Tel Aviv on Fire takes a stab at the tensions between Israel and Palestine. The film by Palestinian...
View ArticleRevisit: The Golden Compass
Fantasy films amassed tremendous box office grosses in the early 2000s, driven mostly by the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter franchises, but those particular wells were drying up by 2007. Writers...
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