Long before he corralled some of the screen’s most skilled improvisers to make such classic mockumentaries as Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, and A Mighty Wind, Christopher Guest served his apprenticeship as a performer with the National Lampoon. As the magazine branched out into other media in the early ’70s, Guest did double duty […]
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The Rambo franchise is about a U.S. veteran who keeps finding himself in situations where he has no choice but to kill dozens of foreigners. He’s always just minding his own business, not killing anybody, when someone comes along and recruits him for a mission. Then it’s only a matter of time before Rambo looks […]
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I stopped watching Downton Abbey near the beginning of season 4, when a character was raped and I realized the show was just a regular ol’ soap opera now. The Downton Abbey movie wasn’t made for me, then (it’s for super-fans), but I didn’t have much trouble picking up the plot threads and enjoying a two-hour […]
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Last week IndieWire editor Kate Erbland discovered that her review of Hustlers had been published in Cascadia Weekly, a paper in Bellingham, Wash., without her consent and without payment. The technical word for this is “theft.” Knowing that an act of content theft, like a cockroach, is seldom alone, Kate did some searching and found that […]
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Given the current sociopolitical climate and general state of the world, satire seems like a tall order. How can you comically exaggerate people and situations when everything that happens already feels like it’s already been exaggerated for comedic effect? But for that very reason, satire can also find success during difficult times — it is, […]
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Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead have been floating around the edges of indie sci-fi/horror for the last few years, writing and directing thoughtful under-the-radar films like Spring (2015) and The Endless (2018) that were acclaimed in certain circles but didn’t get much mainstream attention. The duo’s latest, a moody sci-fi drama called Synchronic, could be […]
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Some things just go together: spaghetti and meatballs, ham and cheese, beans and rice, peanut butter and… freshly caught fish? You have to hand it to Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz: The pair of writer-directors have made a hell of a debut feature using a surprising combination of ingredients, some of which sound completely unappetizing […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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, […]
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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 […]
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