Coming on the heels of last year’s documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, the unabashedly adoring Mister Rogers story A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood puts us at risk of deifying the Presbyterian-minister-turned-TV-host. Frankly, I can’t think of anyone in American culture more deserving of the honor. As nearly every other hero has turned out […]

Rian Johnson’s Knives Out is both a loving tribute to the murder mystery genre and a scathing satire of white privilege and the bootstrapping myth in the age of Trump. It’s one of this year’s most entertaining examples of art as a reflection of the time and culture that produced it. Its Agatha Christie-inspired story, […]

Disney’s Frozen has remained an impressive cultural phenomenon since it hit theaters in 2013. We’ve now had six years of little girls dressing like Anna and (mostly) Elsa, and carrying around stuffed versions of Olaf the snowman and Sven the reindeer. Usually there’s some lag time between the first and second films in a franchise […]

What wild and unnatural spirits exist in the depths of the forest, possessing an ancient and eternal power far beyond our reckoning? There’s an otherworldly quality to the woods, especially when they’re unfamiliar to you. When you’ve grown up in a certain area and have memorized the face of each tree and every bend in […]

Society tends not to bat an eyelid at intergenerational relationships so long as the elder member of the pairing is a man. Even as unease mounts over a mating pattern-turned-cliché, people seem more comfortable when the power dynamic aligns with the gender dynamic. It’s tough to say that older women can afford the same luxury, […]

In the aftermath of war, especially one as psychologically scarring as World War II, people become obsessed with black and white. Who was right, and who was wrong. But ironically, wartime is when shades of grey have the most variation, when the lines between hero and villain, patriot and traitor, are constantly in flux. And […]

Holiday movies, especially Christmas movies, tend to be high-concept affairs, featuring guardian angels, kid-made booby traps, or ghosts haunting a miserly old man. Feast of the Seven Fishes is one of the rare Christmas movies about nothing crazier than a family’s Yuletide traditions. The film is an evocation of a particular place and time that […]

In Guatemalan writer/director Jayro Bustamante’s feature debut, Ixcanul (2016), the filmmaker shone a light on how an indigenous community around the rim of a volcano inhibited the sexual development and personal agency of 17-year-old María. Their tribalism, traditionalism, and piety keep them cloistered from the advances taking place in the country’s modernizing urban cores — […]

There’s a lot to like in The Shed, the feature debut of writer-director Frank Sabatella, but there is also, well, just a lot here. Part coming-of-age thriller, part horror, The Shed almost collapses under the weight of its own ambition and its complicated structure.  The film opens with a man, Joe Bane (Frank Whaley, a […]