Director Tomas Alfredson has, with rather unseemly eagerness (I suppose he knew that his otherwise admirable career couldn’t afford such a nasty black mark at this point, without getting in front to go on the offensive), told all of us how The Snowman production was so fraught that he and his crew didn’t even film […]
Nothing says “unforced realism” more than a narratively shapeless slice-of-life snapshot of impoverished kids wandering around in beatific innocence of their own suffering; all the way back to 1946’s Shoeshine and 1948’s Bicycle Thieves, child non-actors floating in front of the camera, guileless in their moral comfort, have been a mainstay of the form. It’s […]
The title of The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) tells us pretty much everything, particularly that warmly fussy parenthetical. This is the latest in that inexhaustible and apparently endlessly fascinating (though to whom?) subgenre of films that are somehow not based on short stories that first appeared in The New Yorker, despite all the appearances. […]
Idris Elba is a damned handsome man, and that’s very close to the solitary reason it’s worth paying any attention at all to The Mountain Between Us. The only other reason I could come up with was the film’s terribly beautiful cinematography, courtesy of Mandy Walker, whom I would like to see get more attention […]
The epic tale of Amityville: The Awakening began in 2011 with Dimension Films and Blumhouse Productions announcing the impending release of a found-footage film titled Amityville: The Lost Tapes, due to come out in the winter of 2012; it stretched across six years and seven different planned release dates, as its production over the summer […]
Victoria & Abdul is so close to being a straight-up parody of ’90s-style Oscarbait that I’m not entirely sure that it isn’t. Certainly, it has a pretty distinctive sense of humor, frequently at its own expense as a indulgence in the genteel, nostalgic authoritarianism of so many films about members of the British royal family. […]
On paper, almost nothing is actually good about Happy Death Day. And yet, almost certainly, it gave me more pleasure to watch it than any other 2017 horror movie. On such paradoxes is a love of art founded. Although I’m being a bit dismissive. While most everything about Happy Death Day can be accurately predicted […]
There’s absolutely no reason to expect much of The Ice Cream Truck, and maybe it’s for that reason that I found it to be such a fetching affair. In at least two very noticeable respects, the film flagrantly boasts the limitations of its teeny-weeny budget: the dialogue, particularly in outdoor scenes, has the unmissable, overly […]
They tell me that one of the major changes between the television series My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic and the spin-off theatrical feature My Little Pony: The Movie is that the film has substantially more polished animation. That could easily be the case, and if it is… oh dear. As 2017’s solitary example of […]
When they write the histories of the cannibal film, many years from now, they’ll have to save a whole chapter for Raw. It’s a right marvel all the way around: it has the unapologetic, unblinking gore of the all the most sordid examples of Italian cannibal films from the late ’70s and early ’80s,* but […]
The most interesting thing about Dawson City: Frozen Time, by far, is the real-life history that enabled its existence. This is not to slight docu-essayist Bill Morrison, of the very highly-regarded 2002 Decasia (which I haven’t seen), among a couple dozen other films that are, as I understand it, mostly rather like this: moving collages […]
I will say this, and say it sincerely: Rat Film is definitely a weird film in all the right ways. On paper, director-writer Theo Anthony’s documentary argues a basic-unto-banal chain of causes and effects: systemic racism keeps black communities in the United States mired in poverty, urban centers that are mired in poverty tend to […]
