For the past twenty years, and exploding further in the days of streaming, most everyone you meet seems to be addicted to some TV show. It’s one of the easier addictions to feed – if it’s not already on a...
“I’ll sing you the gentlest protest song I know,” Joan Baez says in her introduction to “What Have They Done to the Rain” on her 1962 album Joan Baez in Concert. “It doesn’t protest gently, but it sounds gentle.” A...
I’ve seen Werckmeister Harmonies three times – first in 2012 on 35mm at a Los Angeles retrospective dedicated to its director, Béla Tarr; then in 2018 at a one-off screening, also 35mm, in New York; and finally this past week,...
When we think about movies from France, it’s very likely that we automatically go to films from the French New Wave with directors, like Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Agnès Varda, Jacques Demy, and others. (Somewhat) modern French cinema is still...
I’m terrified of spiders. And so are you. Everybody is. Those who say they are not are either liars or not paying close enough attention. Spiders are monsters. As proof, we need only look at the horror genre. Whether big...
“Simple task becomes wholly complicated” is a tried-and-true storytelling approach going back to slapstick two-reelers. We all, to some degree, feel like life is too much of a bother as it is, and any attempt to go the extra mile...
The First Omen, the sixth film in a nearly-fifty-year-old film series, on the face of things, has no reason to be exceptional. All the objective things you can read about it lead to the easy conclusion that it is not....
Coup de Chance is Woody Allen’s 50th, and potentially final, theatrical film, and one would hardly say his most original. Revisiting themes of luck, misfortune, guilt, and violence, comparisons to Crimes and Misdemeanors, Irrational Man, Match Point, Cassandra’s Dream, and...
Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast opens with a scene that both enigmatically alludes to the action to come, yet also suggests the abyss it will pointedly explore without resolving – Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux), an actress in 2014 Los Angeles, walks into...
Writer/director Bob Byington has carved out an enviable, if regrettably low-profile, place in the film industry, regularly turning out expertly-tuned comedies with stellar casts that rarely get wide enough distribution to be seen by many. His latest film, Lousy Carter,...