LATEST FILM REVIEWS
Fatherland Review: The Good German
The 2026 midterm elections have raised a certain hope in America: that the last half century of a rising tide of right-wing extremism and a nascent dictatorship cannot only be defeated but can be ended. The question now is, what’s next? That’s an issue of national identity, a concern shared with Fatherland. In this historical…
Mouse Review: The Left Behind
In a high school theatre class, running through improvisatory exercises, the teacher (David Hyde Pierce) coaches his students as they mill around the room. First, what does your public self look like? Most students throw their arms wide, all performative bigness. Only one student, Minnie (Katherine Mallen Kupferer), takes the opposite posture, curling her body…
How to Rob a Bank Review: TikTok Marxism
Films about social media rarely feel authentic. For every Zola, there’s a dozen or more Sprees. That high-octane subversive action flick How to Rob a Bank feels like its online elements were really crafted with real-world software, and looks like it would find a real streaming audience, is a serious achievement. It’s also one of…
Club Kid Review: Coming Down and Growing Up
If there’s a suitable single-word description for Peter (Jordan Firstman), a party promoter in Manhattan, it would be fuckup. His business partner, Sophie (Cara Delevingne), is a massive cokehead, and she’s the organized one of the two. The closest he’s got to a mature friend is Devon (a delightfully understated Nigil Whyte), who at least…
I Play Rocky Review: Every Underdog Has Their Day
It’s almost impossible for a film to simultaneously be a great biopic, a wonderful date-night movie, a hilarious film industry comedy, and the kind of movie that you could take every relative to see on Thanksgiving. Somehow, I Play Rocky pulls it off. That’s fitting, considering it recounts an equally epic real-life movie triumph. When…
Ebenezer Review: A Christmas Ghost Story Both Familiar and Unique
Marley is not dead: to begin with. This must be distinctly understood or nothing that makes Ebenezer so loyal to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and yet so unique can be understood. This adaptation of the classic Christmas morality tale begins with a scene not in the book: Ebenezer Scrooge (Johnny Depp) and his business…
La Bola Negra Review: Love Is a Battlefield
An opening credits sequence doesn’t just tell you who did what. It can teach you how to “read” a film, too. In the case of La Bola Negra, the credits unfurl alongside archival images of early 20th century Spain, only the black-and-white photos – including of strapping men in military uniform – have been squiggled…
Godzilla Minus Zero Review: One Monster Battle After Another
It’s 1949: Two years after Godzilla wrecked Japan’s Ginza district, and four years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and a new threat has emerged. Unlike Godzilla, who came from the skies, this beast came from a pod that fell from space. For this sequel to 2023’s kaiju masterpiece Godzilla Minus One, writer/director Takashi…
The Only Living Pickpocket in New York Review: Eulogy for a Dying Breed
There’s a very simple shot in The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, but it’s one that tells the whole story of the film. On the banks of the East River, the camera pans from the Brooklyn Bridge, across Lower Manhattan, to the gleaming spires and hypermodern architecture of the Financial District. It’s a metaphor…
Wicker Review: The Love That Is Woven in the Heart
Attention, gentlemen seeking matrimony. Apparently, the most desirable man conceivable looks like a young Ron Swanson, has the voice of Alexander Skarsgård, and occasionally creaks. This is one of the first of many morals of Wicker, the delightfully bawdy fable about the most erotic caning since Sylvia Kristel’s peacock backed chair. Adapted from Ursula Wills-Jones’…
Wildwood Review: Lovely, Dark, and Deep
The oldest opening to a tale of magic and wonder is a stolen baby. Whether it’s pixies or witches or changelings, an empty crib is a reason for the most unlikely of heroes to take a stand against the uncanny. And so it is with Wildwood, the latest from the stop-motion master craftsmen at Laika,…
Fjord Review: Anatomy of a Slap
Don’t be such a sheep. That’s how an unruly preteen named Noora (Henrikke Lund-Olsen) taunts her new friend Elia (Vanessa Ceban), goading her to jump out a not-very-high window. As rebellions go, it’s not a dramatic one, but Elia’s parents, Mihai (Sebastian Stan) and Lisbet (Renate Reinsve), run a tight ship. They have to, they…
A Talent for Murder Review: The Talented Ms. Highsmith Takes Another Stab at Tom Ripley
One-hundred and thirty-some years since movies were invented, I think we’ve all gotten the hang of suspension of disbelief. We have imaginations! We can close the gap between a historical person’s true eye color and a different hue for the actor portraying them. That’s especially when a film is already playing fast and loose with…
Clayface Review: Muck and Murder
Batman doesn’t stop crimes. He prevents Gotham from becoming a horror movie. Look at his villains. A white-faced maniacal poisoner. A half-man, half-crocodile. A man who deals in riddles and deadly traps. Without Batman, the city becomes a mix of creature feature and Saw flick. So, take him out of the equation, and what you…
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…
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…
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…
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