Inside the entertainment business, industries switch. When we look back at the phonographic market, it is changing. For example, independent artists, a small percentage of the pool then, could live throughout their CD sales and concerts at small gigs. It is a reality that changed completely. Today, streamers’ royalties do …
Comedy is one of the great cultural forces. It is, in many ways, the great equalizer. In the hands of a talented performer, comedy speaks truth to power, whether that means mocking our leaders or finding commonality in the human experience. It’s the latter of these that filmmaker Neil Berkeley’s …
There is a reason you’ve probably never heard the name Linda Perry. The singer/songwriter has spent her life hiding from the spotlight, hiding from shame and her perfectionism, but mostly hiding from herself. She is best known for being behind the vocals of 4 Non Blondes and their 1992 mega-hit …
The coming-of-age genre has always explored teenage sexuality. More often than not, it is a genre filled with thoughtful ideas, discussing topics about teenage sexuality that are held taboo in society. Nicholas Colia’s feature debut, Griffin in Summer, an awkward and staid comedy, covers the topic of inappropriate sexual crushes …
Primavera Sound Barcelona was my first solo international travel experience and my first international festival – and what a momentous, once-in-a-lifetime experience it was. Two birds with one stone, and what a way to start things off when it’s a 6-6 festival, with the music sometimes starting as early as …
If there is a more reliable setup for a thriller these days than “young woman trapped in a place with a man,” I don’t know what it is. It’s incredibly versatile, whether you start out with the man being sweet and progressing to darker places, or have him be malevolent …
In the mid-1980s, Andrew McCarthy starred in a number of highly successful teen films. You’ve probably heard of at least two of them: St. Elmo’s Fire and Pretty in Pink. He and several other young actors were positioned at exactly the right time and place to create a cultural moment. …
In the first minutes of They’re Here, we meet Cookie, a sympathetic old lady from New York who enthusiastically talks about her past experiences with Unknown Flying Objects (UFOs). She answers the directors, Daniel Claridge and Pacho Velez, saying she was taken fourteen times, only in her current home. Cookie …
Horror is one of the most difficult genres to tap into. It’s really challenging to keep viewers at the edge of their seats with genuinely scary elements. However, every once in a while, we get to see a movie that truly captures the essence of the genre and takes us …
Wide shots of roads with purplish skies over them. We see that mainly during the sunsets, as Nesa Azimi’s cameras portray. She takes us on a journey throughout the United States railroads and gas stations alongside the female truckers in business. In the first minute of DRIVER, the director introduces …
Meeting with Pol Pot is very loosely based on a memoir by an American journalist named Elizabeth Becker, who was at its first screening at the Cannes Film Festival. It must have been a very strange feeling to see a fictionalized version of some of the most important events in …
Roberto Minervini shared the best director prize in the Un Certain Regard strand of this year’s Cannes Film Festival for this mumblecore-style film about soldiers in the Wild West during the American Civil War. It’s the flipside to Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga (reviewed separately), which has broadly the …
There was one movie at this year’s Cannes Film Festival which was a passion project for the director that got all the attention: Megalopolis. But there was another movie, a passion project for the director, that also played Cannes, albeit not in competition: Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1. This …
Alexandre Dumas’ novel The Count of Monte Cristo is kind of the ur-text for the modern adventure story. Published in 1844, it has it all: treachery, sword-fighting, injustice, long cons, false identities requiring elaborate disguises, secret children, hidden treasure, beautiful ladies, villains becoming heroes, heroes becoming villains, and revenge served …
Any description of The Shameless could make it sound like the most exploitative trash, so it’s stunning to realize that despite the grim setting, the exceptionally troubled characters, and the hopelessness of their situation, that it isn’t. This is a testament to the skill of writer-director (and Bulgarian-American) Konstantin Bojanov, …
Miguel Gomes won the Best Director prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for Grand Tour, which he co-wrote with Telmo Churro, Maureen Fazendeiro, and Mariana Ricardo, because it is an impossible film. It’s an epic pan-Asian journey best described as a mash-up of Wisconsin Death Trip and Apocalypse Now, …
In an unprecedented move, the Cannes Film Festival jury awarded the Best Actress prize this year to the four actresses of Emilia Pérez – Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez, Karla Sofía Gascón and Adriana Paz. This is almost as startling as French writer-director Jacques Audiard making a primarily Spanish-language musical about …
Emma Stone and Yorgos Lanthimos need each other. Through Ms. Stone, Mr. Lanthimos has an entry into Hollywood and the chance for his work to go mainstream worldwide, and through Mr. Lanthimos, Ms. Stone gets the art-house credibility usually denied to actresses whose careers began in teenage sex comedies. But just because they make quite a pair, that doesn’t mean the work …
Other reviews compare Anora to Pretty Woman, but this is a bad mistake. The world has moved on considerably since 1990, and these days, capitalism is now second to oligarchy. Oligarchs are people for whom life is to be lived without consequences because their incredible wealth means anything, or anyone, can be bought. …
It’s been a long time since Cate Blanchett got weird. She’s played unlikeable, she’s played dark, she’s played strange, but not since Heaven in 2002, in which German director Tom Tykwer got her to shave her head and bomb the Italian police, has Cate Blanchett got weird. But Cate Blanchett is also one of the very rare actors in …