There’s some sort of irony in Willem Dafoe providing the voice of a cartoon seagull just a few months after he so memorably appeared opposite a much more menacing seagull in The Lighthouse. Imagining Dafoe’s gruff bird flying out of the brightly animated Swift and into the grimy black-and-white world of The Lighthouse, ready to […]

From their screenplay for Alexander Payne’s The Descendants to their joint directorial debut, 2013’s The Way Way Back, Nat Faxon and Jim Rash have specialized in fractious family units whose members have to come to terms with one another in the midst of emotional upheaval. That trend continues with Downhill, their loose adaptation (co-scripted with […]

It’s significant that Portrait of a Lady on Fire is written and directed by a woman–Celine Sciamma–as well as photographed by a female cinematographer, Claire Mathon. This is a film that is fixated on painterly details and the female form, with the kind of comfort and intimacy that a male filmmaker might not approach the […]

For a group of professional ghost hunters, the main characters in Camp Cold Brook are surprisingly unhappy to discover that the abandoned summer camp they’re investigating is genuinely haunted. At the first sign of actual paranormal activity, the stars of a second-rate cable-TV ghost-investigation show start screaming and running away, despite the fact that this […]

It would be easy for Come as You Are to turn into a cloying, condescending lecture about how the disabled are people, too, and there are times when Richard Wong’s remake of the 2011 Belgian film Hasta La Vista comes pretty close to that. But for the most part, Wong and screenwriter Erik Linthorst avoid […]