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In Review: Support The Girls
Writer/director Andrew Bujalski does something impossible with his newest comedy, Support The Girls: create something sweet and optimistic about American corporate misogyny and indifference. At the end...
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In Review: Madeline’s Madeline
Trust that when a film charts its own unique identity while discussing matters of personal authenticity that it knows what the hell it is talking about. Welcome to the forefront Josephine Decker’s...
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In Review: Searching
For cases like Searching, innovation isn’t enough. Here we’re given a thriller that takes place before our eyes entirely within a computer screen, darting across various social media platforms, news...
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In Review: The Wife
Something is unwell in The Wife, the Meg Wolitzer adaptation from director Björn Runge and starring Glenn Close as its titular enigmatic matron. Jonathan Pryce as her husband is a buffoonish novelist...
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In Review: A Star Is Born
Remakes seldom come with as much Hollywood heft as A Star Is Born. Carrying a legacy almost as old as the cinema itself, this new version comes with its own added baggage of risk: it’s the big screen...
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In Review: Colette
The mere presence of sex is not sexy. But tell that to Colette, the new biopic on the famed early century literary sensationalist from Wash Westmoreland and starring Keira Knightley. It’s a film that...
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In Review: Beautiful Boy
As told in the real life account of David Sheff and his addict son Nic, caregiving for the addict is a process of learning from avoidable mistakes made on a foundation good intentions. Director Felix...
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In Review: The Oath
When dissension needs to be heard, is it still better to speak with nothing to say than to not speak at all? As Ike Barinholtz’s directorial debut The Oath shows, it may be better leaving the outcry to...
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In Review: Burning
Cannes sensation Burning opens with a chance encounter between two former schoolmates, establishing director Lee Chang-dong’s masterful equal stronghold of the casual and the consequential before we...
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In Review: The Happy Prince
The Happy Prince suffers the familiar strains of the modern biopic, charting the humiliating downfall of Oscar Wilde with structurally scattered and emotionally limited effect. Obviously a project of...
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In Review: Boy Erased
Adapted from Gerrard Conley’s memoir, Boy Erased paints a picture of repressed queer white middle America, in all of the religious familial practice and assumption of normalcy to go with the setting....
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In Review: Shoplifters
Hirokazu Kore-eda returns to the family drama in his Palme D’or-winning Shoplifters, crafting a graceful melodrama about the human contradictions of survival in indifferent societies. Once again the...
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In Review: Ben Is Back
Consider Peter Hedges’ Ben is Back as a natural antecedent to his Pieces of April, with a few key improvements. The largely despised previous film was a Thanksgiving-set early-digital filmmaking effort...
View Article2018 Film Year in Review!
2018 Film Year in Review from Chris Feil on Vimeo. Presenting: my 2018 Year In Review video montage! In lieu of brief write-ups on a listicle, I opted to teach myself iMovie (be gentle!) to wrap up...
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In Review: Vice
Vice arrives on the screen in a haze of dorm room pot smoke and farts, the kind of conceptual satire brewed up and whiffed out by dudes confusing vacuous provocation for sociopolitical sharpness. But...
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In Review: Arctic
Joe Penna’s Arctic trades in one of our finest global cinematic exports: the expressive, beautifully-worn topography of Mads Mikkelsen’s face. In this survival story, the actor is distilled down to his...
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In Review: Everybody Knows
All of our greatest filmmakers should be forgiven their misses. Particularly if they aren’t sacrificing their best narrative traits or storytelling identity. They can’t all be winners. Director Asghar...
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In Review: Out Of Blue
Of all subgenres ready for reinvention, the gritty cop drama is one that has had decidedly mixed results. After the peaks and valleys of HBO’s True Detective’s intermittent quality and last year’s...
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In Review: Sunset
In short order, László Nemes has established himself as a director fascinated by creating for the audience disorientation within a physical space and historical context. His Oscar-winning debut Son of...
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In Review: Diane
Underrated character actress Mary Kay Place has finally been given a contemporary showcase for her naturalist gifts in Kent Jones’ Diane. As the eponymous protagonist, Place tells a personal story of...
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