To watch The Quick and the Dead is to embrace in pure pulp from one of Hollywood’s greatest pulp veterans, Sam Raimi – switching gears for the Western with an all-star cast. Sharon Stone, young Leonardo DiCaprio, it’s a black comedy that benefits entirely from director of photography, Dante Spinotti, …
Following the failed effort of rebooting The Exorcist franchise with last year’s The Exorcist: Believer, director David Gordon Green returns to a familiar ground, the comedies. Nutcrackers, Green’s latest, is a film about tragedy in the first place. It narrates the story of the Kicklighter brothers, children who lost their …
Just as there’s a thin line between love and hate, there’s a thin line between romance and horror. What from one perspective shows love conquering all can also be seen as a person (usually a woman) having to deny their career, their sexuality and their independence in order to be …
Content Warning: This is a review of the movie Baby John, and it includes disturbing topics, including discussion of rape, torture, and violence against women and children. No matter where you are in the world, police propaganda has the same problem: how to justify violence meted out by cops with …
“In the entertainment business, you’re not supposed to let your practice sh-t out. It ruins the mystique.” is how Llewyn Davis expresses his carelessness for a box of childhood remnants his sister intends to hand back to him. Inside Llewyn Davis, the Coen Brothers most recent masterpiece inspired by the …
J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings saga struck such a colossal nerve when it was first published because it was a reaction to the loss of the first World War. The displacement of the muddy, modern conflict into a deliberately regressive story of magic and magical creatures …
Angel Studios’ recent movie, Sound of Hope: The Story of Possum Trot is not immune to the studio’s typical criticism (yes, it uses children suffering as a tool to proselytize Christianity), but the film isn’t as bad as its detractors say it is, nor is it as good as its …
Musician and filmmaker H.P. Mendoza’s newest release The Secret Art of Human Flight looks like a B-movie and has an absurd premise usually seen in average-quality YouTube shorts. Known for his skill directing small-budget movies, Mendoza manages to take a film that even at its premise, teeters toward collapse and …
So, in most places, growing up, there are usually books that are required for reading in school. Here in the U.S., you’d find books like Catcher In The Rye, Of Mice And Men, The Great Gatsby, as well as books by Ernest Hemingway, Charles Dickens and such among those reading …
The typical Netflix action thriller and neo-western can fall into two distinct categories. The first involves straightforward generic and forgettable procedurals. Such films simply go through the motions of the genre, delivering stories and bland action sequences seen time and time again. The other involves something much darker, going against …
Well, it seems that we need to say happy holidays to Netflix. Black Doves is the Christmas present you never knew you needed. Think…socks. An expensive, robust pair of socks that doesn’t have holes in them by March. They might not be what you asked for, might not have been …
The line between a successful career and homelessness grows thinner every year. This, along with themes of familial strife, motherhood, and finding your sense of self, is present in Vivian Kerr’s directorial debut, Scrap. When Beth (Vivian Kerr) loses her job, she finds herself and her daughter Birdie (Julianna Layne) living …
Nickel Boys, an adaptation of a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Colson Whitehead, has attempted to meet the current moment by telling a story of horrendous racism and child abuse with neither racism nor violence in it. This is worse than the biographies of Harriet Tubman and Martin Luther King, Jr. …
Thanks to streaming, the landscape of cinema has entirely changed. What once would have been a summer crime caper built for the cinema now goes to the small screen. Depending on how you view it, that can be both a benefit and a curse. The curse is that movies like …
In 2019, author Holly Jackson released the YA fiction novel A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder to critical acclaim. It went on to win 2020’s British Book Awards Children’s Fiction Book Winner of the Year and, as with most award-winning novels, it was soon picked up for a television adaption. …
At first glance, Armand – from writer and director Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel in his feature debut – seems cut from the same cloth as Roman Polanski’s 2011 film Carnage and Fran Kranz’s 2021 film Mass: thrillers of the interpersonal, where parents of squabbling, troubled, or otherwise problematic children come together …
There are few institutions in this world that are more heavily regarded and reviled in equal measure than the Catholic church. From the sects of religious devotees that populate social pockets of the world to their portrayal in modern media that places them in the spotlight for heinous acts of …
Universal Language, the latest from Canadian director Matthew Rankin, follows Abdolreza Kahani’s A Shrine as another delightful Iranian-Canadian comedy hitting the 2024 international film festival circuit – a welcome trend, judging by the quality of these two excellent films. Written by Ila Firouzabadi, Pirouz Nemati, and Rankin, a vignette structure …
It’s always wonderful to see an actor rise to the opportunity and become a great movie star, and there’s a moment late in Gladiator II where the switch visibly flips for Paul Mescal. He (and Daisy Edgar-Jones, who I have written about elsewhere) came out of nowhere in 2020’s lockdown …
I repeat what I mentioned just a few days ago: there are hundreds of new film releases every year, so it’s only natural that some movies – and their filmmakers – unfortunately slip through the cracks. Andrea Arnold (American Honey) has consistently found success at the Cannes Film Festival, winning …