First things first: director Amanda Lipitz’s first documentary feature, Step, is about the first graduating class of the Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women, a charter school opened in 2009, and initially founded by Brenda Brown Rever. Lipitz is Rever’s daughter. Maybe this means nothing at all, and maybe it completely invalidates the film’s arguments […]

Here’s my current frustration at the diminished state of film criticism. I could, in this moment, point you to a whole lot of reviews talking about how Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is an urgent text for our modern times, taking on as it does the issue of how violence against women goes under-reported and […]

A previous version of this review appeared at the Film Experience. If one ever gets to feeling (as I routinely do) that American animation is in a rut from which it will never emerge, or at least not until the back side of some terrible economic collapse, there’s a simple enough solution: look to Europe. […]

I like Guillermo del Toro quite a lot, and I like Jean-Pierre Jeunet a lot, and I like them for very similar reasons – they both make over-saturated movies dominated by production design and fanciful rather than realistic visual effects – and I still would never, ever pretend that I wanted to see a film […]

The world needed a new My Cousin Rachel. Daphne Du Maurier’s 1951 novel of paranoid Gothic romance* was adapted into a perfectly adequate 1952 film most notable for being the American debut of Richard Burton; it’s perfectly enjoyable as a melodramatic mystery (non-fans of Olivia de Havilland might want to convert that “perfectly” to “slightly”), […]

So in defiance of all good breeding, let me get this part out of the way right now: Lady Bird has been ludicrously over-hyped. Everything it does good – which is a solid amount, to be sure – has been done just as good in earlier films about teenagers feeling like they’re stuck in a […]

“These films have a peculiar and at times indefinable whiff of the ersatz”, I once said about films made for conservative, fundamentalist Christian audiences on mainstream models, and while I was right, I got lucky. You don’t know from ersatz until you’ve seen The Star, which is on the one hand a studio-funded “faith audience” […]