Category: Theatrical Review
With his first movie since 2014’s Berlin Film Festival-winning Black Coal, Thin Ice, writer/director Diao Yinan has returned to the noir genre, and crafted an exceptionally stylish audiovisual feast of neon- and rain-soaked sleaze. While Black Coal, Thin Ice was...
This film’s release date has been pushed to April 3, 2020 As a work of cinema, Chris Durrance and Barak Goodman’s Slay the Dragon is largely indistinguishable from any other mainstream documentary of our moment. It’s got the talking heads...
After several sequels and a few misfires, Pixar is back on track with Dan Scanlon’s Onward, a film that is equal parts comedy, heart, and imagination. Like the best offerings from the studio, Onward balances several tones at once, pivoting...
Elem Klimov’s 1985 masterpiece Come and See, a new restoration of which opens Friday at the Laemmle Monica Film Center in Santa Monica, seems to have anticipated a 2010s trend by adopting the very hip 1.37:1 aspect ratio. But being...
In some ways, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have changed in the more than twenty years they’ve been directing movies. In the past decade or so especially, films like The Kid with a Bike and Two Days, One Night have even...
Corneliu Porumboiu’s work can fit many off-putting descriptors – slow, meandering, talky, lacking in plot or character insight, to name a few – and whether one agrees with those conclusions, his films tend to be a tough sell if you’re...
There are few phrases more guaranteed to dampen my expectations for a movie than, “Based on a true story,” especially when it’s heralded in big type onscreen right at the beginning. The implication is that the mere truthfulness of the...
“Too big to fail” is, in case you weren’t aware, an economic concept which says that some business institutions are so large and with such a long reach that their failure would be so catastrophic to so many individuals that...
If you’re looking for fantastic beasts, one place to find them, apparently, is in a Benh Zeitlin film. Eight years after making a splash with Beasts of the Southern Wild, he’s returned with Wendy, an adaptation of Peter Pan that...
One of the reasons that the horror genre endures is its adaptability. Artistic style may change, but the things that scare us don’t. No matter where or when a person may live, at his core, he’s still frightened by the...
