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In Review: Pain and Glory
The films of Pedro Almodóvar have always been personal. His fascinations have becomes their defining characteristics, their anguishes an extension of his beautiful soul bent on provocation, their wit...
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In Review: Frankie
At the core of Ira Sachs’ Frankie, an ensemble drama set on an idyllic Portuguese mountainside, is an acceptance of endings. Set from sun up to sun down in one day of a family vacation, Sachs’...
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In Review: Marriage Story
Noah Baumbach opens his newest film, Marriage Story, with a duet of affectionate observations between married couple Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) and Charlie (Adam Driver). Included in their lists of...
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In Review: The Report
Scott Z. Burns’ The Report puts Adam Driver at the front of an enticing ensemble to meticulously examine the uncovering of the US military’s enhanced interrogation tactics in the wake of 9/11. Like the...
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In Review: The Irishman
The Irishman is the kind of self-reflective film to come at what might be the beginning of the end of a master filmmaker’s career, made remarkably alive in its ideas and narrative weight through the...
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In Review: Ford v. Ferrari
Noise does not equate to excitement, but don’t tell that to James Mangold. With Ford v Ferrari, the director takes an extensively familiar and cliched approach to unexamined industrial history. Despite...
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In Review: Frozen 2
Rather than stepping forward in usual fairy tale sequel fashion, Frozen 2 looks backward. Perhaps not in ways that are expected or all that desired, a strange pivot for one of the most clamored-for...
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In Review: A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
“It’s good to talk.” So goes the old adage of Mr. Rogers and the new film that follows his teachings and unique impact on American society, Marielle Heller’s restorative A Beautiful Day in the...
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In Review: Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Arresting the senses and stimulating the mind, Céline Sciamma has made one of the most breathtaking screen romances of the decade with Portrait of a Lady on Fire. After her powerful previous features,...
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In Review: Honey Boy
Honey Boy is like witnessing an exorcism no one asked for and the demon is Shia LaBeouf’s dad. The actor, having long since burned out his many chances due to extended bad behavior including an arrest...
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In Review: Dark Waters
There’s an unexpected combination of spiritual material to auteur in Dark Waters, the true life retelling of Ohio lawyer Robert Bilott and his long-lived case against the DuPont corporation. Both a...
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In Review: Clemency
Chinonye Chukwu has a very ambitious debut with Clemency, a film that looks to balance advocacy with a poetic delivery that gets at the soul of a contentious American issue. The film is clear in its...
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In Review: 1917
War films regularly find filmmakers obsessed with the experiential, leaning into some element of the form that places the audience in the position of soldiers on the battlefield. Apocalypse Now...
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In Review: Richard Jewell
Churning out films at a steady clip, Clint Eastwood has become as synonymous with no-frills fast turnarounds to get his films into theatres as quickly as possible. Expediency seems to be the most...
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In Review: Cats
The thing about Cats, the record-setting Broadway musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber and based on a series of poems by T.S. Eliot, is that it exists as a piece of pure, unadulterated imagination. No matter...
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In Review: Downhill
Transposing Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure through an American lens, Downhill casts Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Will Ferrell as parents on a skiing vacation that may sink their marriage. When a mountain...
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In Review: The King of Staten Island
After his longest filmmaking gap since emerging with The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Judd Apatow returns with another character piece about someone getting their shit together. His films have been defined by...
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In Review: Irresistible
Like the reanimation of ghosts past, the year leadup to an election cycle always guarantees a cinematic product and a shrugging response by audiences. Studios program glib or grim political musings...
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In Review: She Dies Tomorrow
In Amy Seimetz’s tranfixing She Dies Tomorrow, anxiety and self-revelation are catching. With a foreboding tone that dips fingers into (and unsteadies) several genre waters, the film explores personal...
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In Review: Words on Bathroom Walls
Teen melodramas, while somewhat unfairly treated as disposal in the marketplace, have recently found renewed value in telling important stories previously excluded from their genre’s narrative. While...
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