“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 certainly does that; in this introductory […]

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 nasty, well-executed action is thrilling to watch, and self-aware […]

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 rooted in authenticity in […]

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 from its opening seconds? Onward probably fits […]

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 society. Like where […]

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 delivering a social message. Based on the memoir by South African anti-apartheid activist […]

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 […]

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 […]