LATEST FILM REVIEWS
Sense and Sensibility Review: The Marriage Plods
The irony is that, while we Janeites will always welcome another Jane Austen adaptation, we’re liable to find them wanting. How could we not, when the original text is so sublime? And any attempt at adapting Sense and Sensibility to film is further hampered by the simple fact that Ang Lee and Emma Thompson’s 1995…
Ken Russell’s The Devils Review: The Sacred and the Profane
I: Ecstasy Film enthusiasts around the world have been waiting like zealots anticipating Judgment Day since it was announced that Warner Bros. Clockwork division would be rereleasing The Devils. Not simply that it was a chance to see British iconoclast Ken Russell’s subversive masterpiece, but the full, purposefully obscene and provocative original cut, in all…
Misty Green Review: The Hollywood Dream Dies Again
When a filmmaker is writer, director, and star of their own movie, it looks like an ego trip. But when Chris Rock cast himself as failing Hollywood director Jordan Green in Misty Green, he’s not really putting the focus on himself. Instead, it’s on Rosalind Eleazar (Slow Horses) as Misty Green – no relation –…
Musk Review: The Stench of Corruption
What would you think if I said that the world’s most dangerous man lives just outside Austin in a compound surrounded by dozens of women he has impregnated and a cadre of enforcers and fixers? You’re probably thinking of some Jim Jones wannabe with chemical weapons, but as Alex Gibney argues in his new documentary,…
You Can See Everything Review: Looking the Wrong Way
This is not a film about Theranos. It’s barely even a film about Elizabeth Holmes, the convicted fraudster currently jailed in Federal Prison Camp, Bryan and headed next fall to a halfway home just outside of Austin. It is instead a documentary about Nathan Fielder’s relationship with subjectivity. At least, half of You Can See…
Whalefall Review: Rapture of the Not-So-Deep
Whalefall begins with Josh Brolin securing a weighted diving belt to himself and jumping off the back of a boat with no air supply. The immediate response to this is to think, “Well, that’s one way to get out of appearing in this film.” Sadly, even hiding out in Davy Jones’ locker can’t save him…
Naza Review: Cold Data, Cold Blood
Naza is not simply a film about the ongoing Israeli bombing campaign against Gaza. It is a warning. Starting in 2023, directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor spent almost two years interviewing over 100 people involved in the Gaza offensive, from soldiers to drone operators to intelligence officers. For the film, 24 of them were…
The Social Reckoning Review: Network Down
But is it art? As a snarky twentysomething, I cherished a T-shirt that bore that question, a guaranteed if glib conversation starter at any bar. I thought of that shirt while watching The Social Reckoning, screenwriter-turned-director Aaron Sorkin’s followup to the Oscar-winning The Social Network. An old-fashioned, unsubtle account of how a whistleblower revealed Facebook…
Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother Review: Faith and Death in the Houston Heat
Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother is a revisionist revenge film, but not in the fashion of the first and still best John Wick film. Instead, this brooding yet tender drama about faith and violence is revisionist in the same ways that the original Point Blank, Paul Schrader’s Hardcore, and Ghost Dog: The Way of…
The History of Concrete Review: Who Is John Wilson?
Bless John Wilson, who will puncture his ego faster than anybody else could possibly get to it. Creator and star of How to With John Wilson, the COVID-era HBO docuseries, Wilson knows he’s not exactly a household name. So, early in his debut feature documentary, The History of Concrete, he helpfully summarizes his backstory via…
Beware Boiúna Review: Snake With No Bite and No Brain
Mike P. Nelson hasn’t only directed soft reboots of established horror franchises, but it’s definitely become his stock-in-trade. First there was his abysmal relaunch of the redneck cannibal Wrong Turn franchise as some kind of half-witted conspiracy flick. He followed this up with his re-envisioning of Silent Night, Deadly Night, which welded together the Christmas…
Digger Review: Best Buried Deep and Forgotten
Ever heard that old saying, this meeting could have been an email? Similarly, rather than being a film, Digger could have been a burning bag of dog poop delivered to Adam McKay’s doorstep. A seeming broadside at heavy-handed Hollywood advocacy flops like Don’t Look Up, it’s a scathing pastiche of everything that makes such movies…
Fantastic Fest Review: Wild Horse Nine’s Hitmen on Holiday
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Two hitmen comically bicker and philosophize while nestled away in a strangely unfamiliar and out-of-the-way setting. Narratively, Martin McDonagh’s latest film, Wild Horse Nine, could be the flip side to his 2008 film In Bruges. Both films are pure fiction anchored by unforgettable performances and mordantly whip-smart…
Primetime Review: The Evil That Men Do
Primetime, like the early 2000s TV show To Catch a Predator that this film lays bare, is in turn icky, undaunted, questionable, and compellingly watchable. Documentary filmmaker Lance Oppenheim (Ren Faire, Some Kind of Heaven) makes his narrative feature debut with Primetime, a film based on real events that thrusts newsman Chris Hansen’s hidden-camera show…
Fantastic Fest Review: Victorian Psycho
Winifred Notty is the sanest person she has ever met. This must be true, because she says it to herself so often. And clearly one would require the sanest person alive as the governess for two children at a manor house in 19th century Yorkshire. The idea of the well-balanced young lady of lower social…
Fantastic Fest Review: DogGod
In this long-banned Thai film from 1998, a group of men and women literally worship a mongrel dog in their ashram. They dress the animal in a monk’s robe and floral wreaths, and carry it around on a pillow. It’s easy to see why more than 25 years ago the Thai powers-that-were regarded the DogGod’s…
Fantastic Fest Review: What Happened to Doris?
For the last decade and a half, audiences have endured The Conjuring films, big-budget propaganda for infamous self-proclaimed demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren. Always purportedly based on real stories, those films ignore that the cases that the notorious scam artists inserted themselves into involved real people who were going through something horrifying. Whether you believe…
Fantastic Fest Review: The Cycle
No one expected the director of the profoundly silly ThanksKilling to create The Head Hunter, a profound meditation on grief and violence wrapped up inside a monster movie. In the intervening eight years since that shocking change of direction, filmmaker Jordan Downey added a particularly stomach-churning and weird installment for V/H/S: Beyond, and now returns…
Fantastic Fest Review: The Glorious Dead
There’s a certain cadence to the films of the Adams Family. Not that they’re predictable. It’s that, even after a run as genre favorites and festival favorites since their 2019 breakout, The Deeper You Dig, their films are instantly recognizable. There’s a certain lived-in griminess, a real-world bleakness balanced against wily intellect and magickal instincts,…
Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger Review: It’s Not Just Rock & Roll
Fathers and sons united in song. Girlfriends hugging and crying. A lone lad standing post-show, red-faced and awestruck, as a stadium of 80,000 begins to clear out. In a sea of Adidas bucket hats and pints of Guinness, these are the images memorialized, with dramatic flair and vibrant color, in Oasis: Don’t Look Back in…
Hope Review: A Monstrous Waste of Potential
As a critic, I long ago accepted that which films do and do not get a theatrical release is a decision process that lies far above my pay grade and I will only suffer sleepless nights if I ponder them too long. These enigmas are doubly murky when it comes to the seemingly arbitrary path…
The Sun Never Sets Review: A Love Triangle in the Land of the Midnight Sun
In the first half of his career, as a foundational member of the mumblecore movement, Joe Swanberg was making at least a movie a year – a galloping clip of funny, provocative, scruffy works by and large about people acting like idiots. But the pace got to be too much, burning out fans like myself who…
Dear You Review: Identity and Integration in a Hidden Family History
Chinese historical drama Dear You’s original title translates more accurately to Love Letters to Grandma. Yet it’s been a long time since Iap Sogriu (Wu Shaoqing) has received that kind of mail. Instead, Lamgi – or Ama, as her grandson, Hiou-ui (Zheng Runqi), calls her – has quietly raised her family and tended olive trees…
Onslaught Review: Pervy Sex and Bloody Death
Long before Adam Wingard became the guy who made box office eye candy like the Godzilla films, he made a little hallucinatory horror called Pop Skull about junkies in Alabama. It’s a skeezy, depraved little nightmare, and if you’ve been wondering where that Adam Wingard has been for the last few years, then it’s safe…
Idiots Review: The Curse and Comedy of Self-Deception
“Are you familiar with the philosophy that everyone, everywhere is always doing the best that they are able to in that given moment?” If seemingly irredeemable but ultimately harmless scumbag Mark (Dave Franco) is right when he muses this thought to a motel manager, then he’s in real trouble because his best is not that…
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