Lord forgive me for starting with the most obvious question, but in the case of Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made, it is the most obvious because it is also the most dumbfounding: how is it that one goes from directing the winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture to making a direct-to-streaming children’s movie […]
Ingmar Bergman, as we all know, stopped making movies with Fanny and Alexander. His next movie, two years later, was After the Rehearsal, and this was a point of much friction between him and his foreign distributor, Triumph Films. For Bergman, it was extremely important that nothing else he ever made after Fanny and Alexander be […]
2016’s The Boy isn’t a very good movie, but for a horror movie released in January during the 2010s, it’s pretty darned good. For a January horror movie directed by William Brent Bell, who perpetrated 2012’s inhumanly bad The Devil Inside, it’s an I’ll-be-god-damned miracle sent down from the Lord Christ on fucking high. More […]
Pablo Larraín, probably the most prominent Chilean director in the world right now, has at this point directed eight feature films. Most of these are period films; most of these are explicitly about politics; most of them have a certain performative sense of irony. His eighth and newest film, Ema falls into not one of […]
Maybe it’s just me, but it feels like Kate Winslet has been gone for a very long time. She has, of course, been showing up in movies and TV shows, lots of them. But for about a dozen years following Sense and Sensibility in 1995, it felt like she was a pretty reliable middlebrow fixture […]
The film that has been released in the United States and the United Kingdom as [The] Iron Mask, with the article disappearing if you (like me) are west of the Atlantic – that banal little title covering up a truly dumbfounding number of AKAs in at least English and Russian including Viy 2, Journey to […]
She Dies Tomorrow is a film that is first and foremost about creating a mood, and I wonder if you might be able to guess what that mood is based on just the title. Hint: while “tomorrow” is a word with a negotiable definition in this case, the title is not ironic. The film, writer-director […]
You are Ingmar Bergman, one of the most famous motion picture directors in the history of the medium, and you have just completed Fanny and Alexander, a monumental declaration of your intention to be done with the art form, having said all you will ever say with it. And critics have agreed, anointing the film […]
There are so god-damned many film and television incarnations of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle’s iconic misanthropic detective, it would be ludicrous to make a definitive claim about any of them being the best or worst, the most or least faithful, or just about anything else. But I will nudge far enough into this dangerous […]
As inevitably and irresistibly as the sun rising and the tide coming in, any actor who has enormous muscles and an even marginally acceptable sense of comic timing will eventually make a children’s comedy that has him pratfall in the face of a preternaturally self-assured tween. And doom has now come to wrestler-turned-character actor Dave […]
Reviews of all episodes: Episode 1: “Mangrove” (15 November 2020) Episode 2: “Lovers Rock” (22 November 2020) Episode 3: “Red, White and Blue” (29 November 2020) Episode 4: “Alex Wheatle” (6 December 2020) Episode 5: “Education” (13 December 2020)
Education, the fifth and final entry in director Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology is almost certainly the most straightforward: as a narrative, a delivery system for a political message, as an aesthetic object. Whether this is good or bad is in the eye of the beholder; for myself, I will not pretend to be a […]
