HandMade Films was formed by George Harrison and his business manager, Denis O’Brien, for the express purpose of bankrolling Monty Python’s Life of Brian – so it was only natural that the company became a clearinghouse for Python-related film projects in the early ’80s. These included Live...

With a Friend Like Harry (2000) is in essence a thriller, but it chills with the creeping dread of a horror film. This tightly-plotted, slightly surreal French production has unfortunately slipped gently into obscurity. Twenty years after its release, director Dominik Moll’s quietly chilling...

Blue Steel feels like an overlooked entry in Kathryn Bigelow’s filmography. It doesn’t have the online appeal of Point Break, from which Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze gifs populate Twitter timelines. It doesn’t have the history-making distinction of The Hurt Locker, for which Bigelow...

“So open up the window and let me breathe.I said open up the window, shh-shh-shh-shh-shh, and let me breathe.I'm looking down to the street below, Lord, I cried for you,Ha ha, I cried, I cried for you, ha ha. Oh, Lord. The cool room Lord, is a fool's room.The cool room Lord, is a fool's...

Midsommar. The Invisible Man. Hereditary.  It's a common staple of horror, but lately lots of genre films have featured (white) women who are perceived as weak-minded and unstable until suddenly (and sometimes horrifyingly) they are not. Recent film criticism has interrogated the implications...

It’s tempting to pretend that Gene Hackman’s career ended with The Royal Tenenbaums. More than three decades after his breakout performance in Bonnie and Clyde, the actor is at his prickly best as Royal, an absentee father in the last act of his life who’s hoping to reconnect with the family...

Director Ari Aster’s goal with Hereditary wasn't to make a horror film - it's a family drama, first and foremost, portraying one family's tragedies, one after another, via known horror tropes. The results are even more frightening than the conventional horror effort. Annie Graham (a phenomenal...

Jonathan Lynn's comedy The Whole Nine Yards (2000), released 20 years ago this week, is a crime caper that draws much of its comedic energy from the clash of two different types of masculinity. We're used to this from the buddy cop genre and others like it, but Whole Nine Yards applied it to a...

"Before, I was alone. Now I'm not." - Honeymoon In The Tenant (1976), Roman Polanski's drunk Trelkovsky asks when, after cutting off so many limbs and appendages, he ceases to be himself: "If you cut off my head... would I say, 'Me and my head' or 'Me and my body'? What right has my head to...

Mrs. Bruce (Lin Shaye) comes down the stairs carefully holding a full glass of red wine. She rifles through her vinyl collection, selects one by The Carpenters, and gingerly places it on the record player. Reclining in her armchair, Mrs Bruce sips her massive glass of wine. Suddenly, unexpectedly,...

The Time: The mid-’90sThe Place: Downtown New York CityThe Setting: A nondescript warehouse/film studioThe Scene: “Ellen and Damian Kiss” When it arrives, the blow-up has been a long time coming. Ever since he showed up on the set of the indie film he’s agreed to be in, egotistical...

Based on my own research. Films included only if they played theatrically. Corrections and additions are welcome (@ me). For comparison’s sake, here are the 2018 and 2017 editions. Total wide releases (600+ theaters): 146 Sequels, prequels, remakes, reboots, and franchises:...

The more I do this, the more it seems wrong to call these the "best" movies when I only saw a fraction of the entries. Well over 1,300 new films were released in the U.S. this year; I saw a couple hundred of them. And that's just the U.S.! So it should be "Best Movies Among Those I Watched, Which...

1999 is considered one of the strongest years of cinema in living memory. There were countless articles in 2019 marking the 20th anniversaries of that year’s greatest hits and examining their impact and legacy. But this column isn’t about those movies. This column is about the overlooked...

With over one hundred years separating World War I and the present day, cinema has consistently had to find new ways of depicting it for modern audiences who, unlike moviegoers in the first half of the 20th century, have no personal connection to it. Early films about World War I are defined by...