A Night at the Garden Short, and sweet? Clocking in at a slim seven minutes, Michael Curry’s documentary is solely composed of archival footage shot at Madison Square Garden on February 20th, 1939. There’s a crowded street. Mounted police officers...
There’s a surprisingly consistent theme across the animated short films nominated this year: The many phases families experience throughout a lifetime. Four out of the five films explore this theme in different ways. Animal Behaviour “Animal Behaviour” is the one...
J.C. Chandor’s All Is Lost, from 2013, is a decent enough movie in its own right but even if it weren’t, if nothing else, it would have given us an easy reference point for the subgenre of solemn survival thrillers....
The Appaloosa sees Marlon Brando as Mateo, a tormented soul looking for revenge. A buffalo hunter and soldier only a decade or so removed from the Civil War, Mateo (or Matt, as only the credits call him) returns to his...
So much of the recent filmed fiction set in the 1980s has been more an attempt to bottle an imagine collective memory of the era than any actual, tactile transportation. Joanna Hogg’s magnetic, gentle and magnificent The Souvenir feels different and...
Even before the sharp objects come out and the blood starts flowing, it’s clear that Nicolas Pesce’s Piercing will be a film of physical performances. In the first few minutes, Christopher Abbott grabs himself by the neck and pinches shut his windpipe....
In his entrancing 2015 film Embrace of the Serpent, Ciro Guerra balanced a deep respect with an anthropological fascination with the lives and cultures of Amazonian tribes aching to preserve their way of life in the 20th century. Now, with...
The Bounty is a unique motion picture. On the surface, it looks like your average, neo-colonialist high-seas adventure film with heaving oceans, high stakes and, given the title, a power struggle to boot. Yes, there’s all that, as well as...
Even though Gurinder Chadha’s anthemic, deeply moving Blinded by the Light is, to a large extent, a movie about the music of Bruce Springsteen, it opens with a song more specific to its 1987 England setting, “It’s a Sin,” by the Pet Shop...
Even a cursory glance at the pedigree behind Relive would be enough to get one’s hopes up. It’s from Jacob Estes, the director of Mean Creek, and it stars Brian Tyree Henry, Mykelti Williamson and Alfred Molina in addition to its...
