Mission: Impractical — Val Kilmer’s Last Shot at Sainthood

Against all odds, the spy-thriller-with-bonkers-stunts-and-goofy-disguises-starring-a-guy-from-Top–Gun-and-based-on-a-1960s-TV-show industry is booming. Six Mission: Impossibles deep and Tom Cruise doesn’t have much will to live left to lose. It’s no minor miracle that his obsessive devotion to squeezing every last bang out of the moviegoer’s buck has overshadowed his obsessive devotion to that murky volcano-alien religion. The spy-thriller-with-bonkers-stunts-and-goofy-disguises-starring-a-guy-from-Top-Gun-and-based-on-a-1960s-TV-show franchise […]

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Message from Space: The Best Star Wars Knockoff You Probably Haven’t Seen

After the unexpected success of Star Wars in 1977, studios rushed to recreate the film and its massive popularity. This saw a huge spate of ripoffs like Starcrash, Battle Beyond the Stars, and one of the most wildly inventive, strange, and beautiful films ever made: Toei Studios’ Message from Space. Directed by Battle Royale’s Kinji […]

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REVIEW: Blindspotting an Explosive Racial Comedy and Oakland Love Letter

Blindspotting is an explosive racial comedy, a love letter to Oakland, and a jumpstart to the movie career of its star, Daveed Diggs, who co-wrote the screenplay with co-star Rafael Casal. Directed by first-timer Carlos Lopez Estrada, the film is set during the last three days of a year-long probation for Colin (Diggs), who served prison […]

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REVIEW: Boiled Angels: The Trial of Mike Diana Guilty of Being an Entertaining Doc (Fantasia Festival)

(Screened at the 2018 Fantasia Festival; distribution plans not yet announced.) Owing to the slippery definition of the word and our robust (for the time being) First Amendment, it takes a lot to get arrested for “obscenity” in America, let alone actually convicted. A few performers and publishers have been, with famous names like Lenny […]

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Here I Come to Save the Day: The Great White Avenger in Cinema

From The Searchers to You Were Never Really Here, the “captivity narrative” is one of America’s strongest tropes When Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here (now available on DVD/VOD) came out this past spring, it was hailed as a modern update of Taxi Driver. Like Martin Scorsese’s similarly artful — and similarly brutal — […]

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REVIEW: Unfriended: Dark Web Is Too Silly to Terrify, but Fun to Go Along With (Fantasia Festival)

(Screened at the 2018 Fantasia Festival; opens July 20 in U.S. theaters) Unfriended: Dark Web has no connection to 2015’s Unfriended except that they adhere to the same format: Both unfold in real time entirely on someone’s computer screen via their Skype sessions, Facebook chats, and so forth. This structure, a reflection of the “we live online” […]

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