Category: Theatrical Review
This review originally ran as a part of our Sundance 2019 coverage. Most of the attention paid to Alma Har’el’s Honey Boy will likely focus on its content, specifically the fact that it’s an autobiographical film by its writer, movie star...
Any Martin Scorsese movie is (or ought to be) an event but The Irishman feels especially so. That has a lot to do with the much discussed and somewhat harangued runtime, just shy of three and a half hours. But...
It’s baffling to realize that Harriet Tubman—someone who easily makes the shortlist of best and most important Americans of all time—has never gotten the biopic movie treatment before (Cicely Tyson played her on television for a 1978 miniseries). So Kasi...
While Lauren Greenfield’s previous films (Queen of Versailles, Generation Wealth) have been political, her newest, The Kingmaker, is her first to be overtly about politics. But her pet themes are still on display. The site of Imelda Marcos mobbed by...
An intimate work of social-realist portraiture in the vein of the Dardenne brothers, A Thief’s Daughter brings us into the life of Sara, a young single mother trying to stay afloat through circumstances that have spiraled beyond her control. As...
Within the first minutes of Václav Marhoul’s The Painted Bird, an adaptation of a 1965 novel set in a geographically undefined, Boschian hell of an Eastern Europe circa World War II, a young Jewish boy is running through the woods...
Ira Sachs made a splash in 2012 with Keep the Lights On, a harrowing account of love mired in addiction that bowled me over but didn’t exactly leave me eager to watch it again, so consistently raw and upsetting are...
It’s telling that Levan Akin’s And Then We Danced was submitted by Sweden, and not Georgia, for Oscar’s Best International Feature Film category. No amount of festival plaudits could have likely convinced the latter country to represent an LGBT film...
Considering the title of Óliver Laxe’s Cannes-laureled third feature film, it’s not giving anything away to mention that, eventually, a fire does come. Raging through a large swath of rural land in Spain’s Galicia region, it becomes a behemoth outmatching...
From its opening overture, Robert Eggers’s mesmerizing sophomore feature The Lighthouse is permeated with an inexorable sense of creeping, otherworldly dread. The scenario is simple: Thomas Wake (Dafoe), a seasoned and ever-so-salty veteran of the sea and Ephraim Winslow (Pattinson),...
