Back in 2001, fading action star Steven Seagal starred with rapper DMX in Exit Wounds, one of the last Seagal movies to get a wide theatrical release. Seagal has spent the years since then churning out a huge number of low-budget direct-to-video action movies, in which his participation is increasingly marginal. DMX, meanwhile, was just […]

If Sequestrada were a documentary, it might be a success. Onscreen titles explain the plight of Brazil’s indigenous tribes, who have been displaced by the construction of river dams since at least 1989. Writers/directors Sabrina McCormick and Soopum Sohn give a few statistics regarding these dams’ negative effect on not just the tribes but also […]

Peter Strickland has always been a filmmaker on his own wavelength, making uniquely crafted movies like Berberian Sound Studio and The Duke of Burgundy for audiences that are practically a dictionary definition of the term “niche.” It’s hard to get any more niche than his latest, In Fabric, perhaps the cultiest of the British director’s […]

When I heard that Feast of the Epiphany, the inaugural feature film from the publication Reverse Shot, melded documentary and fiction, I assumed it would resemble the more formally audacious hybrids of filmmakers like Robert Greene (Kate Plays Christine, Bisbee ’17). No such porous boundary exists, however. The film resembles something akin to a centaur […]

Are we ever truly able to escape the past? The mistakes that we’ve made, opinions we’ve held, and lines that we’ve crossed may feel like ancient history, but they’re always there. Hidden under a thin layer of dust, waiting for someone to swipe their hand across and reveal the ugliness of the worst things we’ve […]

One of my favorite flavors of indie horror is the mixtape, lovingly dubbed by filmmakers from an oddball greatest hits of genre inspiration. To Your Last Death is equal parts Heavy Metal, Cabin in the Woods, Saw, and The Belko Experiment. Not every riff plays perfectly into the next, but TYLD eventually finds a weirdo […]

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 […]