It’s easy to imagine the same basic stuff of The Fits turning into a stock indie coming-of-age drama: 11-year-old Toni (Royalty Hightower), with few friends her own age or gender, finds herself losing interest in boxing at the Cincinnati community center with her brother Jermaine (Da’Sean Minor) and his friends. Instead she starts spying on […]
It’s inherently admirable when a filmmaker reaches beyond their established strengths to try something new, as Kelly Reichardt has done with Certain Women. The downside is that a director abandoning their strengths runs the risk that their new thing will be, well, not as strong, and this has kind of also happened to Reichardt. Her […]
The good news is that Assassin’s Creed is probably the most stylish video game adaptation ever, for what that’s worth. As you may have heard, movies based on video games sometimes aren’t very good. So the bar for Ass. Creed to stand out was in fact quite low. But still, let’s not get to pissing […]
Buried in Sing is the year’s most harrowing story of a married family life crushing the life out of the people involved. This children’s comedy about singing animals includes a subplot about a pig-woman who only wants out of life to have a chance to sing mediocre pop songs and have any other living soul […]
A review requested by Beef Jerky Guy with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. God knows who thought it made sense for a biopic about the making of The Wizard of Speed and Time to find its way out into the world, but they sure went ahead and made […]
A review requested by Beef Jerky Guy with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Step one: watch this. You won’t spend three better minutes all day. I have only a vague idea of where Mike Jittlov came from or how he came to make the three-minute short film The […]
It’s genuinely shocking to me that Lion is as good as it is, for as long as it is. It’s Harvey Weinstein’s duly-anointed champion for the Oscar season, which has only rarely been a good sign in the 21st Century and is frequently the biggest red flag I can think of. And that becomes an […]
Things to Come is about making things that are exceedingly difficult look effortless. That’s true of its story, but it’s also true of the extraordinary work being done the two women most responsible for the film’s considerable impact: writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve, winner of the Best Director award at the 2016 Berlin Film Festival, and Isabelle […]
A Monster Calls will make you cry. I suppose I ought to qualify that in some way – it will make some of you cry based on certain life experiences you might have had, etc. etc. – but that barely seems correct. A Monster Calls will make you cry the same that that way that […]
A review requested by Alison with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. The 1991 document Madonna: Truth or Dare is a fascinating artifact, one that I honestly can’t quite figure out how to even describe. Despite existing for very nearly no other reason than to carefully manage and sell […]
Ironically, given that it is a movie expressly and entirely about the communicative power of the moving image, Cameraperson gives us the answer key to understanding everything about it in the form of a title card that precedes any other footage: “For the past 25 years I’ve worked as a documentary cinematographer. I originally shot […]
A review requested by Steve T, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. There are, in the broadest possible sense, two epochs of the English-language romantic comedy. One was the age of the great screwball comedies, which ended during World War II. The second was the era of of […]
