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 and gives the characters rapid-fire Sorkinese to […]
Read more
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 erotic thrillers featuring softcore icons Shannon Tweed […]
Read more
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 your humble editor-in-chief […]
Read more
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 of such depictions of hysteria and emotional weakness in women leads. Remember […]
Read more
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 is what Whannell’s previous movie, […]
Read more
Bruce Willis has two modes — playing John McClane and collecting a paycheck. While the latter roles are usually direct-to-Redbox fare, to say that Willis playing some version of his iconic Die Hard lead isn’t meant as an insult. Audiences connected with McClane because he reacted to increasingly escalated situations in a more human way. […]
Read more
It’s tempting to pretend that Gene Hackman’s career ended with The Royal Tenenbaums. Three-plus 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 he rendered dysfunctional. A gruff man’s […]
Read more
Blood on Her Name opens with a scene of intense immediacy. A young woman stands above a man’s corpse lying in a pool of blood on the concrete floor of an auto body shop. She looks both wired and weary, then gradually realizes she needs to do something. Did she kill him? It’s not clear […]
Read more
“What happened?” the doctor in Sex Madness asks, of a female patient who’s come to him with a case of syphilis. “Tell me… everything.” He leans in a bit, and hits that last word… a bit too excitedly. It’s telling – in those two lines of dialogue, in those five words, the actor has summed […]
Read more
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 Toni Collette) is the essence of the film, allowing […]
Read more
For over two hundred years, the world has been enchanted with Emma, Jane Austen’s tale of a “handsome, clever, (and) rich” maiden whose hobby of matchmaking reveals her flaws. Austen brought to life an array of colorful characters across a tidy class spectrum, from lavishly wealthy to modestly rich, with a sprinkling of the plucky […]
Read more
The Call of the Wild will be the first encounter for some viewers (including this one) with the Disney-owned 20th Century Studios – formerly 20th Century Fox – and its awkwardly truncated logo. It feels like an attempt to claim nothing has really changed, that everything’s the same except for the name. If that intro […]
Read more