Ondi Timoner’s Coming Clean is the kind of issue-advocacy documentary that’s full of slogans and sound bites. The magnitude of opioid overdose deaths is referred to in numbers of “9/11s,” “plane crashes” and “Super Bowls” and the solution, we’re assured,...
The White Tiger is the cheekiest movie of director Ramin Bahrani’s career. It even has one of those in media res, freeze frame, “Yup, that’s me, you’re probably wondering…” type of openings. But there’s a dark side to the playfulness....
Here are the top five things that went down at Battleship Pretension this week: Episode 721: The Many Faces of Orson Welles Skyfire: Volcanic Park, by David Bax The Trailer Project with Alexander Miller: Mank/Welles I Do Movies Badly: Auld...
In the opening shots of Some Kind of Heaven, Lance Oppenheim’s feature debut, we see a woman perfectly centered in a medium shot in a squarish, 1.33:1 aspect ratio. The next cut turns us around 180 degrees; now we’re behind...
Though Sam Pollard’s MLK/FBI can be said to be about both the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, it is by no means a biography of either man. Sure, it can be revealing, letting us...
It is crucial, fascinating and shocking to note that Simon West’s Skyfire, making its U.S. debut on demand this week, hit theaters in China on December 12, 2019. Assuming it was a more recent production, I spent much of the...
Gun and a Hotel Bible, directed by Raja Gosnell and Alicia Joy LeBlanc, opens with a monologue, a guy named Pete (Bradley Gosnell) recounting directly to the audience the story of how he met the woman he loves. The bitterness...
After a few short scenes establishing the main characters, their lives and their relationships, Kornél Mundruczó’s Pieces of a Woman announces itself with a long, complex and immersive single take (lasting almost 25 minutes) detailing an at-home childbirth. It’s possible...
From the dewy grass to the communal singing to the Cranberries on the soundtrack, there’s an inherent and naturally charming Irishness to Phyllida Lloyd’s Herself. That charm, as it turns out, is not at odds with the film’s interest in...
Here are the top five things that went down at Battleship Pretension this week: The Midnight Sky: Mostly Cloudy, by David Bax Wonder Woman 1984: Go Ahead and Jump, by David Bax Episode 718: Christmas in Britain News of the...
