I’ll say this about Your Name.: as much as I love it (and I do, a lot), I really cannot begin to understand why this was the film struck such a huge chord, becoming the fourth-highest-grossing film in the history of the Japanese box office (the second-highest Japanese production on that list) and the highest-grossing […]

A review requested by Thomas Hartwell, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. It makes sense that the late 1960s would bear witness to some of the worst musicals in the history of the English-language cinema. The historical confluence was exactly right for it. On the one hand, you […]

Macon Blair, once upon a time, starred in writer-director Jeremy Saulnier’s 2013 indie thriller Blue Ruin, and this is surely what he’s still best known for. That’s not to cast an aspersions against Blair, who’s great in that movie, and it’s not to slight his directorial debut, I Don’t Feel at Home in This World […]

There are many people ready for this strange, essayistic phase of Terrence Malick’s career to be over, and I get that, though it’s not like we’re inundated with associatively-edited mood pieces. Three films out in the entire world in a five-year period doesn’t seem like too many to deal with. But anyway, Malick has been […]

Author’s note: I was obliged to see the Swiss-French film in its English-language dub. And a perfectly fine dub it was, but some of the language choices screamed “this flowed better in French”, and I never quite bought the casting choices for two of the most important child characters. So, grain of salt. To look […]