The genre in which the intermittently great American filmmaker Richard Linklater most consistently demonstrates his greatness (outside of “Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke walk around a city having epistemological debates”) must surely be “Richard Linklater revisits a very particular slice of Richard Linklater’s own life”. And as far as that goes, he’s perhaps never gone […]
Few things are more frustrating for the ardent cinephile than watching a potentially exciting new filmmaker gradually downshift into mediocrity. Twenty years ago, Peter Sollett’s debut feature, Raising Victor Vargas (then called Long Way Home), made a small splash at Cannes, where it premiered as part of the festival’s Un Certain Regard sidebar; shot on […]
Whatever your mileage is with comedy director Judd Apatow, the comedies he made in the mid to late 2000s shaped a decade of what funny movies were shaped like. The ones that were shaped like The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up were even pretty good most of the time. It wasn’t until his 2012 film This is 40 […]
There have now been eight sequels, remakes, prequels, or prequels-to-remakes of Tobe Hooper’s 1974 horror-redefining masterpiece The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and I think it is relatively easy to argue that every single one of them is bad. Hooper’s own 1986 follow-up The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 has its enthusiastic partisans, among whom I don’t number, […]
For those of you who missed my review of 2019’s Tall Girl last week, please note that it’s a movie that never should have ever received a sequel, and of course I watched said sequel the first second it was possible for me to do so. There’s nothing more intriguing to me than a movie […]
Bollywood remakes a lot of films from across the globe, applying the inimitable stamp of Indian filmmaking to such classics as Oldboy (Zinda, 2006), Reservoir Dogs (Kaante, 2002), Mrs. Doubtfire (Chachi 420, 1997), and even I Know What You Did Last Summer (Dhund: The Fog, 2003). Even if it takes a couple of years for […]
Next week, Netflix will premiere what is certain to be one of its most audacious boondoggles of all time: the sequel to their 2019 original film Tall Girl. But one cannot simply walk into Tall Girl 2 if one does not have the proper context. Luckily for you, I am here to provide that lest […]
Netflix may be emblematic of the accelerating death of culture and the transformation of motion pictures from one of modern society’s dominant art forms into an endless churn of impersonal “content”, but every now and then they use their powers for good. To wit: the new three-part anthology film The House, in which four terrific […]
So, I’ve been working the “shitty direct-to-Netflix romcom” beat for a while, and I’m usually as happy as a pig in slop. I like to get my hands dirty digging through the mud of smooth and shiny bland filmmaking and root out the gems. Or, more frequently, the gnarled potatoes that are shaped funny and […]
It is a strange thing to say of a director’s unmistakably intimate, personal, and passionate film that it also feels like he’s working in an unusually minor mode. But I’d be hard-pressed to come up with a better way of quickly describing the very curious ambivalence at the heart of The Hand of God, which […]
It was, I believe, my father who introduced me to the phrase “he thinks his shit don’t stink” as a pithy way of denigrating the kind of person who is arrogantly convinced of their righteous infallibility. I will not say of writer-director Adam McKay, and his newest film, Don’t Look Up, that he thinks his […]
Single All the Way might be Netflix’s first gay Christmas rom-com, but let’s not bother to be impressed by anyone’s first gay anything. The LGBTQ community has been so systematically ignored by the entertainment industry for so long that you’ll stumble across a “first” if you put in even a modicum of effort. The only […]
