The facts of the history related by Jodorowsky’s Dune are thus: in 1975, Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky, having made in quick succession the films El topo and The Holy Mountain, had become a massive celebrity among the art film set, virtually inventing the concept of the midnight movie. He was in a position that few […]

There is one thing that I can say in praise of >Dumb and Dumber To, so I might as well lead off with it. It has a certain casual, easy comfort to its style. That is to say, it’s a film that picks up the baton of mid-to-late-’90s comedy filmmaking quite effortless and without strain: […]

Not that one expects much out of a movie like Air Bud, but I still wasn’t expecting it to reveal itself to be quite so vile quite so quickly. Very nearly the first thing that happens in the entire movie is a series of comic close-up shots of a little yellow bird, sitting on a […]

To hear directors James Franco and Travis Matthews tell it – and oh, how much you get to hear Franco tell it, over and over, across the movie’s achingly long 60 minutes – the purpose of Interior. Leather Bar. is to interrogate the comfort level of the viewer and performer alike surrounding explicit gay sex […]

The pitch for Gloria from virtually every angle has always been some variant on “yada yada, but Paulina García is amazing“. And boy, is she ever. Few actors are ever called upon to support an entire feature-length film with such totality – there is, I think, a grand total of one shot in which she […]

I foreground pee-drinking not because it’s fun to take cheap shots (which it is), but because the film genuinely cares that much. Pee-drinking is the first thing that happens. We get the scene-setting as a portentous but oddly tinny-sounding narrator invokes “The future. The polar ice caps have melted, covering the Earth with water. Those […]

First point: Foxcatcher is, I am certainly, exactly the film director Bennett Miller wanted it to be. It is too precise, too focused, and too consistent for anything else to be the case. Second point: that’s not really much of an excuse. A true story of psychological gamesmanship between one of the more peculiar members […]

The first half of the 1990s were the worst time ever to be a fan of horror. Even the stretches of time where horror films weren’t being made were better, since at least the absence of horror is preferable to the virtually uninterrupted stream of shit that was North American genre filmmaking in the era […]

Everything about Ida sounds like it was copied verbatim from the Big Book of European Art Film Clichés: full-frame black and white cinematography with emphasis on the whole range of greys, frequently silent people staring mirthlessly and hopelessly at nothing, the Holocaust looms imposingly in the background, and the whole thing is a metaphor for […]

In most ways, “the 1990s in cinema” is a hard thing to define, aesthetically or otherwise. Mostly, it’s the thing that transitioned between the 1980s (infatuated with narrative simplicity and violence) and the 2000s (CGI-driven franchises and a kind of pop-market humanism), with the constant, lecturing presence of the most artistically and commercially robust independent […]

It’s worth admitting right in front that Birdman is nowhere near the best version of itself. Setting aside every other issue that someone could possibly have with it, it has been kneecapped by a story problem that would have been so easy to keep away from, and in fact the four screenwriters – Nicolás Giacobo, […]