It’s become somewhat inevitable for American directors behind personal, low-key and -budget films to find a foothold in throwback genre cinema to get any kind of foothold at all. David Robert Mitchell followed his sweet teen film The Myth of...
It’s rarely a bad idea to begin a discussion of a film – particularly a French film, particularly an Arnaud Desplechin film – with a word from Godard. Writing in 1950, he posted, “At the cinema, we do not think,...
As long as Sean Baker’s Tangerine exists, all Steven Soderbergh’s Unsane can hope for is to be the second best feature film shot entirely on an iPhone. Happily, that’s exactly what it is. Soderbergh gains points by baking the device’s...
I really don’t want to be such a Wes Anderson apologist. I feel like it undermines my credibility as a critical filmgoer to like his movies as much as I do. Especially since he has, especially over the last ten...
There’s a reason you don’t see many farces shot in the desaturated, shaky camera style that’s come to define so much of 21st century cinema. Sure, Armando Iannucci pulled off the juxtaposition with In the Loop and his preceding television series, The Thick...
Lately, I’ve been paying particularly rapt attention to movies about life under Nazi rule or occupation and how people reacted and survived. With the rise of white nationalists here in the United States, emboldened by a President with no qualms...
You don’t have to be a student of history to know that the trenches during World War I were horrific places to fight. Journey’s End does not attempt to glorify that field of battle, but it also never quite fully...
Nash Edgerton’s Gringo would have been a mild sensation if it came out twenty years ago, the kind of movie whose posters would be all over dorm rooms and that would be in heavy rotation on the TV in your weed dealer’s...
Let’s get the obvious out of the way. Though Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin was written and shot before the election of Donald Trump, it should come as no surprise that the scenes involving a fascist, megalomaniac head of...
In a post-Game of Thrones world, it’s nice to be reminded that fantasy is generally considered a kid-friendly genre. That’s not to say there’s no danger to be found in Ava DuVernay’s bright, lush, universe-hopping A Wrinkle in Time; after...
