With her new film, Hustlers, writer-director Lorene Scafaria (The Meddler, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World) wants to take you back to a simpler time in American history. The year was 2007, a new show called Keeping Up with the Kardashians had just begun to air, Usher ruled the radio, low-rise jeans […]
Read more
1999 is considered one of the strongest years of cinema in living memory. There will no doubt be countless articles in 2019 marking the 20th anniversaries of that year’s greatest hits and examining their impact and legacy. But this column isn’t about those movies. This column is about the overlooked gems from 1999 — the […]
Read more
You can tell pretty quickly that something is up with One Cut of the Dead. It starts in an old warehouse serving as the set of an amateurish, low-budget zombie movie, where the director, Higurashi (Takayuki Hamatsu), is having trouble getting convincing performances from his not-very-good actors. During a break in shooting, the makeup artist, […]
Read more
The 2019 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) felt unusually heavy with films concerning religion and its followers. Of the more than 30 films I screened, nearly a third grappled with what it means to be a person of faith or live in a world where religious institutions structure daily life. And within these, a subset […]
Read more
In the year since it was unleashed on the public, two schools of thought have formed around Crazy Rich Asians. Hailed for its inclusion of Asian and Asian-American actors in an industry where said actors are often sidelined, the Golden Globe-nominated romantic-comedy has been recognized as a progressive move forward. Representation matters. And it does […]
Read more
I have a complicated relationship with the Telluride Film Festival. It’s a world-class fest, usually playing some of the year’s best movies, many of them world premieres introduced in person by their directors and stars, who are always humble and gracious. The venues, despite being commandeered school gyms and such, have state-of-the-art sound and projection. […]
Read more
Before I get into grading It: Chapter Two, I’ll admit to being a bit baffled by the runaway success (commercially, but also critically) of its predecessor. At this point, 2017’s It (not to be confused with the 1990 miniseries adaptation of Stephen King’s 1986 horror novel) has become the highest-grossing horror film of all time, […]
Read more
Etiam imperdiet imperdiet orci. Nunc nec neque. Phasellus leo dolor, tempus non, auctor et, hendrerit quis, nisi. Curabitur ligula sapien, tincidunt non, euismod vitae, posuere imperdiet, leo. Donec quam felis, ultricies nec, pellentesque eu, pretium quis, sem. Nulla consequat massa quis enim. Donec pede justo, fringilla vel, aliquet nec, vulputate eget, arcu. Lorem ipsum dolor sit […]
Read more
David Oyelowo, the soulful actor who played Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma a few years ago, deserves mainstream success if he wants it, and tossing off a few crowd-pleasing potboilers might seem like the way to get it. But while Don’t Let Go (called Relive at its Sundance premiere) starts with a perfectly good premise, […]
Read more
A tough, beautiful urban fairy tale by Mexican writer-director Issa López, Tigers Are Not Afraid is a perfect example of how genre films can help us engage with real-world crises without being overwhelmed or discouraged by them. It’s set in an unnamed Mexican metropolis from which thousands of men, women, and children have disappeared since the […]
Read more
When the forces of the universe collide and you have the good fortune to approach the right piece of art at the right age, something magical happens. For some of us, that means getting handed a well-worn copy of The Clash’s self-titled album from a cool older cousin; for others, it means stumbling across a […]
Read more
Gerard Butler is not good at anything, and it’s time we stopped trying to make him be. He uses an American accent in almost every movie, yet is no better at it than he was 20 years ago. He is not convincing as a romantic lead, a villain, a hero, or any other type of […]
Read more