10 years ago, YouTube teamed with producer Ridley Scott to produce the documentary Life in a Day, which compiled clips sent in by people all around the globe, recording what was occurring in their lives on July 24, 2010. Producing a sequel ten years later only makes sense, even without the global pandemic that rocked […]
Cowboys is the latest entry in a subgenre that is certainly interesting to explore: LGBTQ Americana, which has been witnessed in pop culture as far ranging as Brokeback Mountain to that cowboy guy from Village People. The wrenching of the cowboy from the cold dead hands of toxic masculinity has long been a subject of […]
Minari won both the Audience Award and the Grand Jury Prize – Dramatic at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, and this is extraordinarily appropriate. It checks all the boxes of a stereotypical Sundance indie so hard that I almost can’t think of the last film to check them harder (not even the 2021 winner of […]
With The Reckoning, we arrive at the saddest point in the life-cycle of any once-promising film director: the point where we need to abandon hope. Almost a whole generation ago, Neil Marshall blew his way into the world with an extraordinary one-two punch of Dog Soldiers in 2003 and The Descent in 2005, a pair […]
John Lee Hancock wrote the first draft of the script for The Little Things in 1993 (for Steven Spielberg, an unbelievably counterintuitive choice for this grim, gloomy crime thriller), and it’s a great pity that we’ll never know what exactly went into that first draft, or what the finished film would have been like if […]
First Date, which premiered this week at – of all things – the Sundance film festival, is the epitome of a certain type of festival movie. With mid-budget publicity, it could easily compete in the winter wide release schedule, but for the fact that there isn’t a big enough Name in front of or behind […]
Earwig and the Witch, the first feature made by the reborn Studio Ghibli after it seemingly closed up shop for good with 2014’s When Marnie Was There and the 2016 co-production The Red Turtle, finds the company trying to create a new artistic identity for itself. I would say that I am uncertain of how stable […]
If somebody tells you you’re about to watch a French film about retirement-age lesbians, it would be foolhardy to assume you’re in for a rollicking good time. Hell, French films about young lesbians are dour enough. When I sat down to screen Two of Us (much more elegantly titled Deux in the original French), I […]
Reviewed under its original title, Eight for Silver, at the time of its premiere at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival The Cursed somehow manages to be two irreconcilable things simultaneously: a thorough re-imagining of the werewolf movie that’s also the most traditional, formulaic werewolf movie in years and years. At the level of plot, it’s […]
Judas and the Black Messiah is a perfectly fine film about Fred Hampton, a man who deserves much better than a perfectly fine film. If you haven’t heard of Hampton, ah! such a marvelous figure you have in front of you, and truth be told, as a starting point – only as starting point, mind […]
Land is a movie as simple and unprepossessing as its magnificently anonymous title. The film, the directorial debut of its star, Robin Wright, is not built for surprise: it takes a character, gives her an unspoken but extremely clear emotional trauma, and lets her work it out over the course of the film’s running. Which […]
“Lunatic visionary cult director Sono Sion makes his English-language debut with a post-apocalyptic samurai Western starring Nicolas Cage” is a collection of words that feels like it was lab-created to end up with a kind of heavily self-aware “Weird”-in-square-quotes example of something too knowing and calculated in its what-the-fuck wildness to be authentic. And arguably, […]
