The grand-scale spectacular biopic Elvis (the fourth narrative treatment of the life of Elvis Presley in any filmed medium to go by that precise title, and at 159 minutes, somehow, also the shortest*) is the first feature directed by Baz Luhrmann in the nine years since The Great Gatsby. It’s been considerably longer since his […]
Serial killer movies and TV shows are common as dirt, and most of the serial killers within them feel a bit commonplace as well: you’ve got your brutish animal menace, you’ve got your erudite reptilian wits, you’ve got your soft-spoken weirdo with an unnerving stare. There aren’t all that many movie serial killers who actually […]
For its first 35 minutes or so, Good Luck to You, Leo Grande foregrounds one of the most fascinating, maddening conversational duets in a good long while—the kind of extended two-hander that definitely feels like transplanted theater but rarely suffers from that feeling. The characters in question are Leo Grande (natch), a ludicrously handsome young […]
I don’t know what was going on in 2018, but the odds of this happening twice seems too high for it to be pure coincidence: a long-running slasher film franchise that had gotten snarled on insoluble convoluted and self-contradicting inter-film continuity rebooted itself by tossing out everything that had created that snarl, making a new […]
Every week this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: infamously, Lightyear is a film based on a different film that never existed but inspired a toy that was […]
The classical romantic comedy has been dead for about a decade. Since the release of, let’s say, The Proposal, the genre has spent quite a bit of time lounging around the opium dens of streaming services and the Hallmark channel, occasionally belching out projects that either rise into the stratosphere, hooked to a baffling high […]
Marcel the Shell with Shoes On could be described as a “reprieve.” This is a kind, gentle, barely-feature-length fable that asks exactly two things of the viewer: find the one-inch-tall talking shell cute, and hope that the one-inch-tall talking shell is ultimately reunited with his lost shell family. I did what I was asked, feeling […]
Lightyear, the 26th feature film produced by Pixar Animation studios and easily the worst one that has no talking cars in it, opens with two title cards relaying the following information: “In 1995, a boy named Andy got a Buzz Lightyear toy for his birthday. It was from his favorite movie. This is that movie.” […]
Sometimes, the peculiar alchemy of what makes a film click with an audience can never be fully understood, but merely accepted as what is, part of the ineffable magic of the movies. This is not the case with the six Leprechaun films that were released between 1993 and 2003. Every person who’s ever seen even […]
In a career spanning 45 years and nine feature-length films, the great Terence Davies, one of Great Britain’s finest living directors, has made only three kinds of films: autobiographies, wordy literary adaptations, and biopics of poets. His newest feature, Benediction, is sort of all three of these things in one body. Officially speaking, it’s only […]
In Abandoned, we find ourselves in the middle of a marriage in peril. Searching for a reprieve from the chokehold that is mental illness after pregnancy, the couple relocates to a remote farmhouse to somehow cure Sara, a new mother, of her depression and potential hallucinations. This beautiful house full of antiques and mystery somehow […]
It’s not like we weren’t due a proper gay Pride and Prejudice. The only one we have so far is the 2016 indie Before the Fall, which is better as a tourism video for Virginia hiking paths than a romantic drama. The Hulu project Fire Island is certainly a proper adaptation. Indeed, it’s a startlingly faithful […]
