The twin theses of Damien Chazelle’s Babylon are that A) something indescribable and precious was lost when filmmaking transitioned to sound in the late 1920s, and the art form is worse off for it; and B) the Hollywood film industry is a brutally exploitative place that gathers emotionally broken people all together so they can […]
Had Steven Spielberg been arrested, for whatever reason, shortly after finishing The Fabelmans, critics would certainly have made note of that fact right up top in their reviews. “Incidentally, this movie’s director currently occupies a prison cell” just isn’t the sort of detail one can omit, however purely gossipy it might be. When it comes […]
The Fabelmans is full of striking images. It is, in a sense, a film about striking images. Perhaps the most striking of all, to me, comes somewhat far into the movie – it is maybe even a spoiler to talk about it. But I’m not sure how much you can “spoil” The Fabelmans: the story […]
Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead specialize in making movies that squander a fantastic—in both senses of that adjective—sci-fi premise. They don’t actually set out to squander anything, I’m quite confident, and certainly there are many rabid Benson & Moorhead fans who’ll disagree (and perhaps even some who don’t mentally mistake “Benson & Moorhead” for a […]
It’s very easy to look at a movie and declare it “a labor of love” whether you actually know that to be the case or not, but for Pearl, there’s no doubt about it. Literally the fact that it exists at all is the proof that it was a labor of love, and that co-writers […]
I would claim, and I would certainly appear to be in a very small minority in doing so, that with Nope, Jordan Peele has officially entered the realm of wildly talented directors whose work is all but guaranteed to be interesting and visually striking on a rare and potent level, but who are also fucking […]
“If you like watching naked people have sex, it’s incredibly hot.” –-Sharon (Noël VanBrocklin), a character in Witchcraft XVI: Hollywood Coven, reviewing Witchcraft XI: Sisters in Blood, and by extension, every other Witchcraft picture As I write these words, Witchcraft XVI: Hollywood Coven is the last of the direct-to-video Witchcraft movies, and there’s a clear […]
There was a stretch of time around the end of the 2000s and the start of the 2010s where Ti West was pretty much the hippest director of English-language horror films. And then, for absolutely no reason I can confidently point to, he simply wasn’t there any more. His last horror feature was The Sacrament […]
It can be to keep it in mind, especially with the memories of the grisly 2020 Oscar-baiting Trial of the Chicago 7 so fresh in memory, but there is in fact something Aaron Sorkin does very well. He’s great at writing a very particular kind of procedural narrative, in which egocentric, talented people involved in […]
Intermittently throughout the summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to a major new release. This week: after 25 years, Space Jam: A New Legacy returns the classic animated figures of the Looney Tunes & Merrie Melodies series […]
Kirsten Johnson’s 2016 feature-length documentary Cameraperson is one of the great non-fiction films of the last decade, a personal memoir that doubles as an inquiry into the “meaning” produced by the photographic moving image. For a while, it seems like her follow-up, Dick Johnson Is Dead, will end up splashing in similar thematic waters, as […]
I haven’t done anything even slightly resembling the legwork it would take to prove or disprove this hunch, but I suspect that there might be more footage of Ingmar Bergman working on the set of his movies than any other filmmaker of the pre-home video generations. He has been the subject of a remarkable number […]
