Back before The Curse of La Llorona came out in 2019, I used that as a catalyst to explore every horror movie featuring the Latin American legend. I watched 18 different movies from across decades and cultures to compare and contrast how they handled La Llorona, the Weeping Woman who hangs out by the river looking for […]
I am curious if future cinephiles will ever come around to think of Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy as anything other than “Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s other film from 2021”. Winning the Grand Jury Prize at the Berlin International Film Fesitval certainly isn’t a little deal, but it doesn’t seem to have done too very much to […]
Insofar as we should always sit up and take notice when a major film director produces an obviously intimate and personal work, then yes, we should absolute bow in the direction of Licorice Pizza. The ninth feature directed by Paul Thomas Anderson – who is, by any measure, a major director – isn’t a work […]
One cannot talk about Memoria (if one is an American, anyway) without talking about the simply batshit release strategy that its director, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and its U.S. Distributor, Neon, have concocted for it. In short: one screen at a time in North America, one week at a time, and it will theoretically just float from […]
There’s a strong possibility that A Hero is the most that Asghar Farhadi has ever “done an Asghar Farhadi”. This would typically be a problem, but since “doing an Asghar Farhadi” basically means to craft a blend of social commentary and white-knuckle moral thriller done in a deceptively loose realist aesthetic, telling a story that […]
This review addresses, with a fairly free hand, plot elements that I, for one, wouldn’t really consider to be “spoilers” for Spider-Man: No Way Home, but I imagine somebody hoping to enter the film wholly pure and ready for surprises would be outraged to learn some of these things. Proceed accordingly. For a movie that represents […]
Whether or not The Matrix Resurrections works very well – I am generally of the mind that it doesn’t really, though it is a better film than either The Matrix Reloaded or The Matrix Revolutions, and that’s sort of the only target it needed to hit – what cannot be taken away from it is […]
The Tragedy of Macbeth comes burdened with a simply relentless amount of baggage, as much as any motion picture released in 2021. First, there’s the matter of the material itself: why in God’s name do we need another film of Macbeth? It is perhaps the Shakespeare play to have been the best-served by the movies: […]
It’s always interesting to see where a director goes after making A Big One, and Céline Sciamma certainly hasn’t made A Bigger One than her fourth feature, 2019’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire. She also hasn’t made a less characteristic one, which is perhaps why her follow-up, Petite Maman, is such a pointed step […]
In all honesty, just the title of The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin) is enough to clue us in that this is going to be a fairly presumptuous motion picture, even without knowing one single other thing about it. Is there a more pretentious punctuation mark, in this context, than […]
