Rather than mature, the indie dramedy has instead long since calcified into a brittle sub-genre, too inured with its perennial sadsack subject to achieve any real impact. This basic convention of a largely inoffensive, immature man-baby who responds to emotional...
Clearly but cleverly made on a shoestring budget, The Djinn manages to make its limitations a mostly natural element of the story, focusing on one boy’s grief following the death of his mother, his sense of guilt and alienation manifested...
Americans are so besotted with the notion of our military righteousness that we’ve sat through innumerable terrible, ostensibly patriotic films for decades, stretching back in a long tradition almost as august as the military itself. We’ll endure the worst dialogue,...
With a name like The Titfield Thunderbolt, the director of A Fish Called Wanda (1988), and the same studio that made gems like The Ladykillers (1955) and Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), there’s the understandable feeling that this film really...
As a critic, one of the most interesting aspects of watching the nominated short films, of any variety, is the growing awareness of a thematic strain, a little something that comes up again and again, as if the films themselves...
John Woo belongs to that worldwide pantheon of legendarily cool directors achieving international notoriety at the end of the 90s, reworking classic Hollywood tropes and genres to create something that, despite those antecedents, feels almost entirely original. But, before bullet...
It’s so straightforward, it’s disarming. A group of people sit around a table somewhere in Israel, some Jewish Israelis, others Germans or Austrians, all too young to remember the history they’re trying to reckon with and yet forced to reckon...
The act of looking back, of examining the past, is a key feature of human consciousness and arguably the primary function of art itself–to render a narrative so we can understand ourselves. As we look back over an incredibly violent...
Film about the oppression of women throughout history and in society is so common now as to be almost its own genre, transcending historical fiction, biopic, epic, fantasy, drama, all of which occupy only a portion of its territory, from...