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 […]

Income inequality has seldom been funnier than in Parasite, a scathing satire-farce-tragedy-horror from South Korea’s Bong Joon-ho (Snowpiercer, The Host) in which a family of scrappy strivers weasel their way into the employ of a rich family and find out how the 1 percent lives. Turns out there’s plenty of misery to go around, it’s […]

The one advantage of Nicolas Cage starring in approximately 87 straight-to-video movies a year for the past decade is that he sometimes adds a bit of unique flavor to rote thrillers and action movies that would otherwise be entirely forgotten. Cage doesn’t bring much to the table in Primal, though, playing a military veteran who […]