Toni Erdmann is a two-hour and 42-minute-long comedy in German, and I foreground that fact because I feel like if I went on and on about how completely wonderful it is, and only at the end got around to mentioning those facts, you would probably consider that I was trying to play a trick on […]
It is clear to anyone who’s followed my reviewing through more than one Oscar season, I’m sure, that I have very little use for biopics. But anything can be done right, and there’s not much more right you can get than Jackie. On paper, at least, the film looks like a craven attempt to win […]
I shall simply cut to the chase: The Wailing is all that I could possibly ask of a horror movie. The Korean import isn’t perfect, of course, particularly with an ending that goes through at least one too many switchbacks (though the concluding pair of scenes are exquisite), and a distinct over-reliance on “scary dream […]
Starless Dreams is an exercise in pure heartbreak. The documentary has more on its mind than simply making the viewer feel terrible (it is, in fact, a social problem film, though one that offers nothing resembling a solution for the seemingly endless nightmare of human suffering it depicts), but feeling terrible is an unavoidable side […]
Like so many other animation buffs, I’ve learned that it pays to be breathlessly excited for any and every new movie turned out by Laika, the studio Phil Knight bought for his son Travis using the billions of dollars Phil earned for co-founding Nike (there’s a real possibility that Phil Knight is my favorite living […]
In 2002, the great Russian director Aleksandr Sokurov exploded into international prominence with a movie filmed inside one of the world’s great art museums, using the collection and the physical space to mount an argument about the national identity and history of the country housing that museum. 13 years later, he did the same thing, […]
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 […]
Director Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2009 international breakthrough Dogtooth is a bar set so high that you’d not even mind if it he never managed to leap over it again, and yet here we are: just two films later – and the director’s first film in a language other than his native Greek (it’s English and a […]
There’s something deliciously off-kilter about folding a story about the abuse and genocide of indigenous South American cultures into what amounts to a mismatched buddy comedy (minus any jokes), and for that alone, Embrace of the Serpent – Colombia’s first-ever nominee in the Best Foreign Language Film category at the Oscars – would deserve our […]
The first challenge in talking about The Duke of Burgundy is describing it. I think it is a tremendously great film; but the sort of people who would be most likely to agree with me aren’t the people who’d be most easily seduced by hearing the basic details of its scenario, and the sort of […]
We’re so far along the hype/anti-hype/counter-anti-hype path in regards to The Witch, a year and more after it was the toast of Sundance 2015, that I really don’t know what we’re “meant” to think about it at this point. I am merely content to therefore claim that I really liked it, anyway. And I do […]
There’s a notion going around that The Assassin is a hard movie to parse out at the narrative level. This is so. I have now seen The Assassin three times, in fact, and if you were to tell me that I had to clarify what every scene contributed to the overall narrative at each point, […]
