The attention-grabbing pitch for Jojo Rabbit — a little German boy near the end of World War II has an imaginary friend, and it’s Hitler — is ultimately secondary in importance to the film’s more serious, sentimental themes. That the film, adapted and directed by Taiki Waititi from...

Hollywood biopics generally focus on the biggest and most renowned figures in the realms of entertainment. Everyone knows and loves Ray Charles, Elton John, and Tina Turner, so it only makes sense to tell their personal stories in a biography-style movie. But what of the artists who aren't...

The Golden Glove is the remarkably unpleasant true story of a German serial killer in the 1970s, told with matter-of-fact, steely-eyed brutality by Turkish-German filmmaker Fatih Akin. Jonas Dassler is uglied up real good to play Fritz Honda, a hunched, oily psycho with a wispy mustache lingering...

Considering how good America is at producing icons worthy of biopic treatment, it's ironic how bad we are at making biopics. The usual formula is for someone to give a career-best performance as some tortured artist or other but for the movie itself to be a by-the-numbers recitation of events from...

(Screened at Fantastic Fest; release TBA.) We all have our own personal biases when it comes to movies. For example, I am instantly curious to see any H.P. Lovecraft adaptation -- partially because lots of his short stories and damn good but mostly because the man's work is notoriously difficult...

(Screened at Fantastic Fest; theatrical release TBA.) One simply cannot deny that the former Harry Potter, aka Mr. Daniel Radcliffe, has done a fine job of choosing unique, offbeat, and even downright weird scripts in recent years. Between Horns, Kill Your Darlings, and Swiss Army Man, it's...

Long before he corralled some of the screen’s most skilled improvisers to make such classic mockumentaries as Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, and A Mighty Wind, Christopher Guest served his apprenticeship as a performer with the National Lampoon. As the magazine branched out into other media...

The Rambo franchise is about a U.S. veteran who keeps finding himself in situations where he has no choice but to kill dozens of foreigners. He's always just minding his own business, not killing anybody, when someone comes along and recruits him for a mission. Then it's only a matter of time...

I stopped watching Downton Abbey near the beginning of season 4, when a character was raped and I realized the show was just a regular ol' soap opera now. The Downton Abbey movie wasn't made for me, then (it's for super-fans), but I didn't have much trouble picking up the plot threads and enjoying...

Last week IndieWire editor Kate Erbland discovered that her review of Hustlers had been published in Cascadia Weekly, a paper in Bellingham, Wash., without her consent and without payment. The technical word for this is "theft." Knowing that an act of content theft, like a cockroach, is seldom...

Given the current sociopolitical climate and general state of the world, satire seems like a tall order. How can you comically exaggerate people and situations when everything that happens already feels like it’s already been exaggerated for comedic effect? But for that very reason, satire can...

Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead have been floating around the edges of indie sci-fi/horror for the last few years, writing and directing thoughtful under-the-radar films like Spring (2015) and The Endless (2018) that were acclaimed in certain circles but didn't get much mainstream attention. The...

Some things just go together: spaghetti and meatballs, ham and cheese, beans and rice, peanut butter and… freshly caught fish? You have to hand it to Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz: The pair of writer-directors have made a hell of a debut feature using a surprising combination of ingredients,...

With her new film, Hustlers, writer-director Lorene Scafaria (The Meddler, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World) wants to take you back to a simpler time in American history. The year was 2007, a new show called Keeping Up with the Kardashians had just begun to air, Usher ruled the radio,...

1999 is considered one of the strongest years of cinema in living memory. There will no doubt be 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...