LATEST FILM REVIEWS
The Python Hunt Review: Mass Murder in the Everglades
It doesn’t matter how much they avoid people, how little danger they really pose, but just because they didn’t have the common sense to grow some fur and look traditionally cute, no one really cares if you kill a snake. As python hunter Joe Wasilewski, aka the Croc Doc, puts it in new documentary The…
LifeHack Review: Cybercrime Flick Never Escapes the Small Screen
Screens within screens within screens: thus is seemingly the fate of cinema, with viewers catching fragments of narrative in one of several competing windows. Sometimes that’s even a deliberate plan by the filmmakers. LifeHack, which debuted at South by Southwest last year, is the latest such screen life escapade from producer Timur Bekmambetov. After helping…
Is God Is Review: Bloody Revenge Burns
There’s a short list of playwrights who have become filmmakers, and a rare few have directed their own stage play for the screen: names like Harold Pinter, Neil LaBute, Luis Valdez, and now Aleshea Harris, who crafted the film version of her critically lauded debut, Is God Is. It’s probably wise that she oversaw this…
Obsession Review: You Can’t Spell “Possessive” Without “Possess”
The author Carson McCullers believed that in any relationship there is the lover and the beloved. She wrote, “the beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons.” That’s basically the plot of unhinged horror Obsession, in which spineless dweeb Bear (Michael Johnston) finally gets the love-of-a-lifetime devotion from his platonic best…
The Wizard of the Kremlin Review: Inside the Political Mind of Russia
Not enough people know who Vladislav Surkov is. If they did, maybe the world wouldn’t be in as horrific a place as it is now. To be clear, Vadim Baranov (Paul Dano, There Will Be Blood) is not Surkov, even if the man known as the Grey Cardinal of the Kremlin is the clear inspiration…
The School Duel Review: A Different Kind of School Shooting
There are moments in the bleak social commentary of The School Duel that make it clear that satire is dead. Or rather, that the extremity of what is happening in American culture is so grotesque that it’s almost impossible to push into the realm of absurdist commentary. Yet maybe that’s when writer/director Todd Wiseman’’s brutal…
Blue Heron Review: Some Things Last a Long Time
Within the family at the center of Blue Heron, the black sheep is a blond. Fair-skinned teenager Jeremy (Edik Beddoes) is an outlier among his siblings, two jostling preteen boys and watchful, 8-year-old Sasha (Eylul Guven), who are all darkly featured and take after their Hungarian parents (Iringó Réti and Ádám Tompa). Jeremy’s hair color…
Two Women Review: Sex and the Married Woman
The last couple of decades of sex comedies, especially those emanating from Hollywood, have rarely felt like they were made for or by adults. That’s definitely not true of the delightfully thoughtful and unapologetically horny Two Women. An updating of sorts of director Claude Fournier’s 1970 saucy romp Deux femmes en or (Two Women in…
Hokum Review: A Terrifying Welcome in the Haunted Isle
Hidden down a leafy Irish backroad, the Bilberry Woods Inn is the kind of oak-paneled and leather-padded manse that was once a destination for the wealthy decades ago. Yet now it is tired, and closes for the winter season. The very name hides a bitter secret: Unlike its sweet colonial cousin, the blueberry, the wild-growing…
Everyone Is Lying to You for Money Review: Mr. McKenzie Goes to Washington
First-time filmmaker Ben McKenzie wastes no time letting the audience know exactly how he feels about cryptocurrency, the subject of his lively new documentary Everyone Is Lying to You for Money. Just under two minutes in, he turns to the camera and delivers his verdict on crypto with the kind of expert timing and camera-readiness…
Animal Farm Review: Not All Adaptations Are Created Equal
There’s a famous episode of classic British anthology comedy series The Comic Strip Presents… titled “The Strike.” In it, Hollywood producers make a big budget version of the story of the 1984 miners’ strike – an event that devastated communities across the UK – and in doing so one of the great crimes of class…
Mārama Review: Cold Vengeance From the South Pacific
Aotearoa. That’s what the Māori called New Zealand before colonizers stole and occupied it. Nearly three centuries later, many feel that there has been no real reckoning, and so Taratoa Stappard’s Mārama gives at least a glimpse of what that angry recompense might look like, albeit through a Victorian Gothic frame. This is the highest…
Over Your Dead Body Review: Shotgun Wedding
The term “Hollywood remake of a foreign film that was a festival smash” normally fills the chest with dread. So went the initial response to the idea of Over Your Dead Body, a remake of Tommy Wirkola’s 2021 Norwegian bloody action comedy The Trip – a film that was the definitional genre festival smash but…
Mother Mary Review: All the Little Monsters
There’s an unexpected resonance between Michaela Coel’s work in Mother Mary and her recent performance in The Christophers: Both are a functional two-hander, in which she plays an artist whose career has been in the constant shadow of a greater figure, only to find their need for her outweighs their own understanding. But unlike her…
Fuze Review: Disposable UK Actioner Squanders a Good Premise
What if an unexploded WWII-era bomb was unearthed in the middle of London? And what if some criminally-minded folks took advantage of the chaos to do a little capering? The premise of this British actioner is a corker, at least, and it has in theory three potentially gripping staging grounds for drama, with the military…
The Stranger Review: Alienated in Algiers
For those of you who kept a copy of Albert Camus’ 1942 novella L’Étranger around your college apartment to impress fellow students but never actually cracked the spine, it’s not too late to immerse yourself in its subtly revolutionary pages. For those of you that can’t even be bothered with the CliffsNotes, writer/director François Ozon…
The Christophers Review: But Is It Art?
Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape is a foundational text of the 1990s indie film movement in America and, though the Oscars lost interest after his Traffic/Erin Brockovich double whammy in 2000, Soderbergh is the figure a lot of critics point to when surveying the crumbling state of American cinema: That guy? Who figured out…
Lorne Film Review: Behind the Scenes at Saturday Night Live
Ken Burns may have American parks, presidents, and wars on lock, but Morgan Neville is arguably the documentary world’s most prolific chronicler of American pop culture. His films have covered children’s TV icon Fred Rogers (Won’t You Be My Neighbor?), global traveler Anthony Bourdain (Roadrunner), banjoing comedian Steve Martin (STEVE!), and a whole swath of…
Exit 8 Review: The Terror of Repeating Yourself
The tendency of big-screen video game adaptations has been to make the movie more visually elaborate than the source material. After all, if you have endless server farms at your disposal, why not add a few more hairs to Mario’s mustache, or generate a hi-res chicken jockey, or give Pyramid Head even more abs? The…
Hamlet Review: Tragedy Minus Time
Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy has been remade so many times, some novelty is required to justify another spin at the wheel. Director Aneil Karia and screenwriter Michael Lesslie make just such a case in the opening minutes of their adaptation, which reinvents the Danish royals as the super-wealthy family of a South Asian real estate…
Faces of Death Review: Get Back in the Grave
If the word “Mondo” means little to you beyond the film merch company formerly owned by the Alamo Drafthouse, then you’ve probably been lucky enough to avoid the Faces of Death franchise, you sweet summer child. Mondo cinema was the name given to a subgenre of documentaries, spawned in the 1960s and assembled from the…
The Drama Review: To Spill or Not to Spill
Planning even the most modest wedding can be endlessly stressful. Narrowing down the flowers, the food, the first dance, a decent DJ? Exhausting. Writing a toast about your new spouse? Nerve-wracking. Playing a drunken game of “let’s share the worst thing you ever did” a week before the wedding? Ruinous. The Drama – a title…
Two Prosecutors Review: Bolshevism and Its Discontents
A large metal lock clanks against an imposingly tall gate as a guard inserts a key to open the unidentified structure. That clanking sound of padlocks opening and closing is, perhaps, the signature sound of Two Prosecutors. A half-dozen scraggly men enter the vast space behind the gate, looking as though they hadn’t seen a…
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie Review: Big on Cameos, Light on Story
When animated adaptation The Super Mario Bros. Movie released back in 2023, I went to see it despite not being much of a gamer (and when I do game, I’m a Capcom girlie). After all, why not see what all the big, bright, colorful ruckus was about? That seemed to be most people’s attitude at…
Miroirs No. 3 Review: Lost Woman, Found Family
The German actress Paula Beer has a delicately expressive face. In her now-four collaborations with writer-director Christian Petzold, she’s registered vast emotions and emotive styles across that lovely face – tremolo as an abandoned wife in an authoritarian state in Transit, stormy as Undine’s titular nymph falling in and out of love, easygoing and open…
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