Mumblecore Part 2 wraps up with the best film of the bunch, Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture, an assured feature from the Girls creator that uses exemplary directorial work and semi-autobiographical truth to comment on the directionless transitionary post-college period that a return to...
In the opening scene of Lulu Wang’s The Farewell, Billi (Awkwafina) walks down a New York City street while chatting boisterously on the phone in Mandarin with her grandmother, Nai Nai (Zhao Shuzhen). Momentarily, she stops to exchange a few...
It’s not entirely clear why director Riley Stearns chose to set his new movie, The Art of Self-Defense, during some unspecified stretch of the 1990s. Maybe, by having the film’s events take place before the release of Fight Club, he...
Socrates said, “An unexamined life is not worth living.” This is the central theme of Greg Kinnear’s directorial debut, Phil. The film doesn’t break any new ground but it is sweet and asks some interesting questions about how we live...
It’s probably the giant puppies that will make the first big impression on you in Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt’s Diamantino. If it’s not that, then it’ll be the similarly outlandish, perfect physique of star Carloto Cotta who, in the...
Funny Ha Ha may be the most effective film to capture the meandering, awkward, post-college malaise in which no one had any idea what they were doing or where they were going and I never want to watch it again.
When it was announced several years ago that there would be a third Toy Story film, I was wary. The first two were so effective–stylistically, emotionally, and thematically–that for Pixar to return to the franchise after more than a decade...
In this episode of The Beta Couple Podcast, Rachel and Lincoln discuss Nahnatckha Khan’s new film Always Be My Maybe starring Ali Wong and Randall Park.
The major draw of Hampstead is its stars, Diane Keaton and Brendon Gleeson. The rest of the cast is added incentive, seeing as it’s a rounded collective of British actors. There’s Lesley Manville, James Norton, Phil Davis and none other...
This review originally ran as part of our LA Film Fest 2018 coverage. Nick Corirossi’s astounding Deep Murder is such a thoroughly committed work of parody that its commitment is, in some ways, actually part of the joke. Take, for instance, the...
