Grief is not a finite resource. It is used in abundance as a base for art as it is an emotion that is universally felt and resonates with the populous. It affects even the hardest of souls. The grief that is usually picked apart by art is often reserved for …
An ode to family, loss, and the beauty of stories, director and writer Patrick Dickinson’s Cottontail is a quiet meditation on what it means to be part of the world after someone you love has died. Dickinson’s narrative feature debut, the film follows Kenzaburo, played by Lily Franky, a sixty-something …
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 …
2022’s Venice Film Festival opened with the Noah Baumbach directed White Noise, a quirky and chaotic genre-mash up. It is a visually enrapturing film about a family surviving a toxic event while grappling with the feeling of impending doom and the mundane cataclysm of their lives. Adapted from Don DeLillo’s …
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 …
Limited series are becoming a new favorite medium for streaming. They last between six and eight hours and feel like an extended film. Such length allows the story to carry a deep emotional complexity. This complexity has attracted prominent actors to this limited series format. Netflix has championed this medium …
A little over one year ago, Ted Lasso aired its finale. Despite being off the air for an entire year, it has never dipped out of the top five of Apple TV+’s most-watched shows. While plenty of shows gain a new life when they are released in a new format (think Suits …
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, …
The art-house multiverse is here, but this is not necessarily a good thing. The entire point of a multiverse is to enhance the ways in which people engage with each other, whether across time, the planets, or weird dimensions, and to offer space for human interaction not bound to the laws of physics. But the ways …
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. …
For as long as I can remember, I’ve heard that artificial intelligence would one day rule the world. As technology advances at an exponential rate, the fear that stems from that sentiment seems to be increasing as well. Will one day machines and A.I. completely take over our world, resulting …
Netflix has a reputation. There’s no getting around it at this point. They make three things: a bunch of good-to-great TV shows, one or two prestige movies every year, and a boatload of cheap-looking action movies made up of bits and pieces from other, better movies that somehow star A-list actors. Atlas belongs in …
Calling a TV show “underrated” can feel like simplistic praise. With the cavalcade of streaming content, viewers will always have what they call “underrated” favorites. These favorites can still lead to numerous Emmy nominations and critical praise. MAX’s television show Hacks has had thirty-two Emmy nominations and six wins. Seasons one and …
The Girl with the Needle (Pigen med Nålen) is based on such a well-known criminal case in Denmark that mentioning the name of one of the characters is a local spoiler. For the rest of us, the horror must unspool the old-fashioned way as we watch a young woman’s truly desperate …