“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...

“I know this seems bad,” Mo explains, as the police officer leads him out of his high school classroom. “But it’s not entirely my fault.” It’s important to set the proper tone, and establish the dominant themes, early on in your motion picture, and Jason Orley’s Big Time Adolescence...

Exploitation movies are quick, dirty, gory fun. They’re also usually in questionable taste, which is part of their lowbrow entertainment value. You don’t watch VFW or Hobo with a Shotgun or even Brawl in Cell Block 99 for trenchant socio-political commentary. You watch these movies because...

At once as intimate as a sigh and as urgent as a klaxon, Never Rarely Sometimes Always is an essential film about abortion that arrives at a critical time. But writer-director Eliza Hittman’s follow-up to her acclaimed 2017 film Beach Rats never feels like a polemic; instead, this frank drama is...

The True/False documentary film festival is like Disneyland for non-fiction filmmaking. For one weekend every year, the small college town of Columbia, Missouri becomes a magical place where anything is possible. Renowned filmmakers rub elbows with college students, bartenders and farmers. High...

In the era before streaming dominated both television and film, discussions would crop up about this or that TV actor making the leap to movies. Being a star on the small screen never guarantees the same kind of success on the big screen, as actors like David Caruso, the male half of Friends, and...

A Georgia good ol’ boy who takes a vow of silence until he achieves his dream of becoming the world’s greatest cockfighter. A blithe psychopath from California who moves to Miami and embarks on a new career as a fake policeman. A predatory used car salesman who suffers a spiritual crisis and...

With each new Pixar release, there’s a temptation to immediately see where it ranks. How does it stack up to The Incredibles’ sophistication and style? The Toy Story movies’ tender love for childhood and appreciation of growth? Inside Out’s ability to make you cry floods of heartfelt tears...

Typically, the heroes of Westerns are rugged cowboys, bombastic outlaws, or noble sheriffs. They are men with a sneer on their lips and a gun on their hip. They are power fantasies that make the Wild West seem like a grand adventure, gladly glossing over the mundane menaces of living outside civil...

The inmates who break out of Pretoria Central Prison are imprisoned for their political activities, but the context is mostly irrelevant to Francis Annan’s Escape From Pretoria, which is far more interested in generating suspense and painstakingly chronicling procedural details than in...

Ricky Tollman’s Run This Town begins in a bout of stylistic frenzy that defines the ambitions, if not the overall tone, of his film quite well. A mock debate session among whip-smart post-grads quickly borders on sensory overload; Tollman deploys enough split screen to make Brian DePalma blush...

Although he’s still best known for being John Travolta’s brother, for a while in the ’90s and ’00s Joey Travolta carved out a surprisingly robust career as a director of direct-to-video oddities, from kids’ movies starring Ernest Borgnine and a giant turtle or Pat Morita and aliens, to...

The sheer volume of independent movies is certainly a net good for the cinematic landscape, offering up more stories, more voices, and more choices. But there are so many, available via so many venues, that it can get to be a little overwhelming. And thus, we present this monthly feature, in which...

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...

Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man feels like three kinds of genre films melded together. One is a thriller about escaping an abusive relationship, in the vein of Sleeping with the Enemy or Enough. The second is a female-driven crime movie, like Double Jeopardy or Eye of the Beholder. The third...