At a time when indie filmmakers are increasingly turning to crowdfunding platforms to bring their modestly budgeted visions to life, many genre films arrive with a cult audience baked right in. The Void doubles down on that by being about a cult, specifically of disciples in thrall to a Lovecraftian entity bent on altering reality […]
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Despite the never-ending flood of sexual harassment accusations and our President just … talking, this was a pretty amazing year to be a woman. Or, to at least see the feats of amazing women on-screen. While everyone was rightfully cheering Wonder Woman, though, one film slipped under the radar that deserved as much attention. Lone […]
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Any movie starring the eternally great Song Kang-ho is a movie worth seeing, but his latest manages to be more than just terrific entertainment. The true story follows 48 hours in the life of the eponymous blue-collar worker during South Korea’s military coup in the early ’80s that followed the president’s assassination. Crackdowns of universities […]
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One of the year’s most quietly devastating performances can be found in Terence Davies’ immaculately rendered portrait of poet Emily Dickinson. That is, it’s quiet until the moment Emily (played with a fierce, undeniable intelligence by Cynthia Nixon) releases the emotions she’s kept pent up inside her. Cloistered as she is (she’s introduced at a […]
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“I want to talk to you about America,” says Channing Tatum’s Mark Schultz dispassionately to an unenthusiastic auditorium of elementary schoolers at the outset of Foxcatcher. Steven Rogers could have just as easily cribbed the line to begin his script for I, Tonya. Though much of the discussion around that film (directed by Craig Gillespie) […]
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The premise of Jumanji, a holiday hit 22 Christmases ago, was that a board game brought jungle animals into the real world to chase Robin Williams around the house. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, a surprisingly peppy quasi-sequel, updates and reverses it. Now it’s a video game that magically sucks its players into its perilous […]
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Dennis Quaid has been in the movie business since debuting as an uncredited bellhop in 1975’s Crazy Mama, and he’s made another 67 feature film appearances in the four decades since. He frequently jumps across genres from comedies to action to prestige drama, but there’s one near-constant throughout his filmography: Almost all of his lead […]
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There was a comforting sense of deja vu in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which kicked off a new trilogy by mimicking the plot structure of the original film. Don’t worry about falling into a rut, though. The next chapter, The Last Jedi — Episode 8 if you’re scoring along at home (and I know you […]
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“I’ve hit rock bottom.” Matthew Broderick could often be found sitting on the ground, holding his head and repeating this mantra around the set of Deck the Halls, a festive lark sold on the impossibly real tagline “There Glows The Neighborhood.” Eulogized with an impressive 6% Rotten Tomatoes score from 83 reviews, Deck the Halls […]
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From the early ‘80s to the mid ‘90s, John Hughes wrote about two dozen films, eight of which he also directed, but he never forgot his roots as a Chicagoan. In a 1986 interview included on the Planes, Trains and Automobiles Blu-ray, Hughes said, “All of my scripts begin with ‘Exterior—Chicago Suburb’ and go from […]
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Auteur theory is debatable, but it’s a prominent feature of film theory with a cache of connotations. In the opening scenes of The Disaster Artist, James Franco’s endearing tribute to infamous director Tommy Wiseau and his film The Room, none other than J.J. Abrams refers to Wiseau as an “auteur.” The word conjures guffaws from […]
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Darkest Hour is about a controversial leader’s steadfast refusal to engage in peace talks in favor of going to war. Not the sort of message you’d expect people to support these days — but I should mention that the leader is Winston Churchill and the war is the one to stop the Nazis. We’re not […]
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