Rediscover: Not Fade Away
“This is a test of the emergency broadcast system.” This common refrain of American culture opens 2012’s Not Fade Away, the only feature film made by “The Sopranos” creator, David Chase. Jettisoning...
View ArticleFreaks
Freaks defies audience expectations at virtually every turn. Opening as an apparent post-apocalyptic survivalist thriller, the film first presents a housebound young girl named Chloe (Lexy Kolker) as...
View ArticleMonos
Monos unfolds on a landscape that is definitely somewhere on Earth but feels utterly alien. Clouds encircle mountain peaks as a cadre of young men and women train in front of a dilapidated structure....
View ArticleHoly Hell! Sleepy Hollow Turns 20
It would be tempting to reconsider Sleepy Hollow in the wake of what would occur after it: Depp’s monumental decay as an actor of importance; Jeffery Jones’ 2002 arrest; Burton’s own creative...
View ArticleOeuvre: Varda: Jane B. by Agnès V
Agnès Varda’s Vagabond ends with its itinerant heroine drained of all life, energy and warmth, homeless and defeated, freezing to death in a ditch. Abandoning a drab bourgeois existence for one of...
View ArticleThe Goldfinch
Nothing lasts forever. That’s the ultimate message communicated by John Crowley’s The Goldfinch, but with a duration that seems to last a lifetime and cinematic storytelling that is dead on arrival,...
View ArticleMidnight Traveler
In a powerful documentary made in the face of racism and xenophobia, Hassan Fazili and his family flee Afghanistan after a bounty is placed on the filmmaker’s head by the Taliban. Though the bounty and...
View ArticleThe Weekend
Modern indie comedies tend to borrow a lot from the films of Éric Rohmer and other auteurs who specialized in hyper-verbal, conversational pieces about character and circumstance. Many a film in this...
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Rediscover: La vérité
Henri-Georges Clouzot never cared about destroying his protagonists. In the twin pinnacles of his cinematic triumphs – The Wages of Fear (1953) and Les Diaboliques (1955) – the French director ripped...
View ArticleDepraved
We need a new take on Frankenstein like we need a bolt in the neck, but that didn’t stop Larry Fessenden from gleefully indulging in a modern spin on one of fiction’s most iconic monsters. The...
View ArticleThe Sound of Silence
In expanding his short film The Sound of Silence into a feature length debut, filmmaker Michael Tyburski stretches an interesting premise well beyond its breaking point, taxing an otherwise unique...
View ArticleCriminally Underrated: The Sweetest Thing
Coming into the production of the underrated 2002 comedy The Sweetest Thing, nearly all of the talent involved was riding high. Star Cameron Diaz was fresh off the blockbuster hits Charlie’s Angels and...
View ArticleOeuvre: Varda: Kung-Fu Master
With Jane B. by Agnès V., Agnès Varda contemplated the emotional complexities of aging, paying particular attention to how this process affects a person in the public eye, their reputation dependent on...
View ArticleDownton Abbey
For fans of television’s “Downton Abbey,” the British phenomenon which ran for six seasons and concluded, gracefully, four years ago, the film continuation will be absolute perfection. This new,...
View ArticleAd Astra
Since no one in space can hear you scream, directors have used the milieu time and time again as a backdrop for characters to explore the idea of solitude. If we learn more about ourselves when...
View ArticleVillains
It’s a familiar premise, so familiar that even its subversions are tired at this point: two passionate lovers on the run, carried by the open road as they rob their way across the country. But in...
View ArticleZeroville
One needs to look no further than Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood to see that Tinseltown’s sometimes unseemly obsession with itself can still lead to impressive cinematic achievement. But this tendency...
View ArticleCorporate Animals
If you polled comedy writers about subjects that were hard to make funny, cannibalism would sit near the top of the list. But that didn’t stop writer Sam Bain and director Patrick Brice from trying...
View ArticleRevisit: The Devil and Daniel Johnston
When considering art, we tend to conflate mental illness and genius. Vincent van Gogh’s self-severed ear looms as largely in the Dutch post-impressionist’s lore as does The Starry Night. The outsider...
View ArticleBloodline
Watching the film Bloodline, it’s difficult to imagine how it got made, given how its premise makes it feel like little more than an ill-fated pilot for a “Dexter” reboot. But in execution, it winds up...
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