Bones and All, the seventh feature film directed by Luca Guadagnino, is kind of about cannibalism, and this is where it gets itself into trouble. No film should be “kind of” about cannibalism. Some subjects just don’t allow for half measures. You should never walk out of a film whose protagonists are cannibals – bisexual cannibals, even! – and say, “well, I liked that, but I’m not entirely sure that […]

Ten minutes into The True Adventures of Wolfboy, we were triggered.  You see, I usually shut off movies about bullying and Rob is super self-conscious about his body hair (he has the perfect amount of body hair), so when a young kid with hypertrichosis gets verbally abused by some douchebags at a carnival, tensions were high. About The True Adventures of Wolfboy The True Adventures of Wolfboy follows a young […]

Ten minutes into The True Adventures of Wolfboy, we were triggered.  You see, I usually shut off movies about bullying and Rob is super self-conscious about his body hair (he has the perfect amount of body hair), so when a young kid with hypertrichosis gets verbally abused by some douchebags at a carnival, tensions were high. About The True Adventures of Wolfboy The True Adventures of Wolfboy follows a young […]

I’m not going to go so far as to say that Queen & Slim has the best opening sequence of any 2019 movie, though it’s good enough that that thought flickered across my mind briefly. I am going to say that it has the best opening credits sequence of any 2019 movie, perfectly timed after a certain beat in that opening sequence, and marshaling some uniquely cinematic conceits to create one […]

I would certainly not want The Dead Don’t Die to be anybody’s first exposure to director Jim Jarmusch, but since it has an unusually wide release for that director, and an unusually friendly genre for that director (it’s a comic zombie movie), and a seemingly endless list of famous people in the cast, it seems clear enough that it will be that first exposure for a great many people. So […]

Chalk up another victory for the evergreen “non-Americans understand America better than Americans” genre. Lean on Pete has an English writer-director and an English producer, it was made using only British money, and it is the most clearheaded, unsentimental portrayal of the perilous life of poor Americans living outside of the social mainstream since 2016’s American Honey, another largely British affair. We should expect nothing less than Andrew Haigh, who […]

Whit Stillman has, kind of, always been making Jane Austen adaptations: his 1990 debut, Metropolitan, is a loose reworking of Mansfield Park, in addition to mentioning Austen in the dialogue, and his entire career to this point (five movies and an Amazon pilot that didn’t get picked up, in 26 years – also a 1996 episode of Homicide: Life on the Street that he didn’t write, but how crazy would […]

With The Last Days of Disco writer-director-etc. Whit Stillman solidified the pattern that had begun with his 1994 sophomore effort Barcelona of taking four years off in between his breezy, talky comedies: four years that were very well spent, though I do not know and to be honest do not care if the time was spent coming up with an idea, fussing over the script (it seems rather unlikely that […]

Werner Herzog is not, in the best of times, a director who especially cares if you (yes, you personally) particularly like what he’s doing in a given movie or not. Which means that when he goes full-bore and makes a film that seems to spend its entire running time ensconced firmly in his own head, we’re talking about a seriously unapologetic explosion of self-indulgence. Even the very title of My […]

No film by the chameleon-like director Olivier Assayas met with as much brutal misunderstanding – at least, in the United States; I cannot speak to its reception in Europe – as 2002’s demonlover, a stupendously intelligent assault on globalism, e-commerce, the media, corporate culture – oh, and violent pornography, although insofar as the movie has anything to say about pornography or sexuality at all, it’s only as a means to […]