Category: Theatrical Review
Film schools ought to start forbidding aspiring directors, as early as possible, from introducing protagonists via wordless montages of their morning routine (I fully admit to having committed this sin in college myself). It’s not that we don’t get an...
“Tell me a tale of thyself, so that I may know thee.” “I have none to tell.” “Yet.” This exchange, early on in David Lowery’s stunning new film, The Green Knight, between King Arthur, his nephew Gawain, and Queen Guinevere...
In Edson Oda’s affecting debut feature Nine Days, Will (Winston Duke) is a man who lives alone in a house that stands isolated in the middle of a vast desert landscape. It is his job, we learn, to interview prospective...
Watching Trent O’Donnell’s Ride the Eagle is hardly a groundbreaking cinematic experience. It combines various familiar narrative tropes into one story that is as light as a feather, utterly predictable, and often quite charming. Like his main character, the director...
Tanya Wexler’s Jolt stars Kate Beckinsale as Lindy, a woman with clinically diagnosed impulse control issues. Ever since she was a little girl, when something bothered her, she would react violently. After years of attempting to channel this negative energy...
Quentin Dupieux’s last two films, Deerskin and Keep an Eye Out, represented a newfound level of intellectual effort on his part, a willingness to apply his trademark absurdity to something beyond superficial weirdness while still, of course, leaving some room...
When we first meet Sylwia (Magdalana Kolesnik), the protagonist of Magnus von Horn’s Sweat, she is happy. Ecstatically so, in fact. She’s leading a massive group workout session in the common area of a Warsaw shopping mall, cheering on the...
Marooned following the cancellation of SyFy’s infamous Ghost Hunters, directors Kendall and Vera Whelpton pursue similar material in Sleepless Unrest, concerning the reputed real-life counterpart to the home from The Conjuring. With the turgid pace of a particularly long reality-in-name-only...
Benoît Jacquot makes a lot of movies. His newest, Casanova, Last Love, is the fourth I’m reviewing for this site in the last ten years and that doesn’t even represent half of his output in that time. Given his prolificity...
As was the case in his previous film, 2018’s John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection, Julien Faraut’s The Witches of the Orient is hypnotic, idiosyncratic, often beautiful and surprisingly fun. In regards to that last descriptor, Faraut–who works extensively...
