In the latter years of my grandfather’s life, he began to exhibit some mild signs of dementia but, mercifully, it never deteriorated beyond that. He wandered into confusion, but never drifted so deep that he couldn’t be reeled back. Florian Zeller’s The Father is all about that tragic drift, inexorable and all-consuming, memories and perceptions […]
Parallel Minds
Most movies struggle to come up with one good idea. The sci-fi thriller Parallel Minds has a handful. There’s one about a high-tech contact lens that lets you see your own memories. There’s another about a First Nations woman with psychic powers, and a half-remembered past. There’s a third about an artificial intelligence that’s become […]
Donna: Stronger Than Pretty
When Donna and Nick got married, they pledged to be together forever, for richer or poorer, for better or worse. Except it gets worse pretty quickly. Unfortunately, so does their movie. And unlike Donna, audiences are unlikely to stick around, hoping it’s going to get better again. Donna: Stronger Than Pretty is a portrait of […]
Nomadland
Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland traverses both the physical and philosophical implications of a very specific cultural bubble: the culture of willful itinerants, those individuals who live off the grid, untethered to anything permanent, the antithesis of what most of us would consider “normal.” The film’s title craftily lends this lifestyle its own spatial resonance in modern […]
I Care a Lot
Marla Grayson (Rosamund Pike) is a terrible person. The scam that she runs isn’t illegal, exactly, but it’s immoral and unethical and just plain mean. Marla targets vulnerable senior citizens who have little to no family connections and possess substantial financial assets, and she colludes with a doctor to get a court to declare those […]
79 Parts
It’s not easy to make a convincing period piece on a small budget, but director Ari Taub pulls it off surprisingly well with his 1970s-set crime drama 79 Parts. This is the kind of movie that lets the mustaches and accents do most of the work, but it’s full of entertaining mustaches and accents, attached […]
Barb and Star Go to Vista del Mar
Kristen Wiig played plenty of strange, baffling characters on Saturday Night Live, but her movie career has been focused more on grounded roles, even in broad comedies like Bridesmaids or Ghostbusters. That changes with Barb and Star Go to Vista del Mar, starring and written by Wiig and Annie Mumolo (who also co-wrote Bridesmaids). This […]
Minari
Minari is a simple plant, sometimes referred to as “water celery.” It’s a wild green that’s bountiful growth makes it ubiquitous in East Asian cooking, particularly in Korean cuisine. That growth makes it uniquely special – its seeds will grow anywhere, even in what would appear to be inhospitable environments. The America of present day […]
Saint Maud
Saint Maud, writer-director Rose Glass’ debut feature film, is a fascinating, at times frustrating meditation on faith, mental illness, loneliness, and connection. The story centers on a young live-in hospice nurse who calls herself Maud (Morfydd Clark) and has taken on a new patient, Amanda (Jennifer Ehle), a former dancer and choreographer with Stage 4 […]
The Wanting Mare
It’s rare that scrappy filmmakers with even scrappier budgets produce a movie as ambitious as The Wanting Mare. It’s an artsy poem of wide, gorgeous landscapes, a story of multiple generations that’s both confident and perplexing. If Terrence Malick dove into sci-fi, the result would probably look and feel like this. Audience reaction would be […]
A Nightmare Wakes
These days, the tale of the conception and writing of Frankenstein during a summer of 1816 in Lake Geneva, Switzerland has become the stuff of legend. A Nightmare Wakes uses this as the foundation for its story, which uses the life of Mary Shelley and scenes from the novel to delve into her growing obsession […]
Malcolm & Marie
Malcolm & Marie is a sneaky reflection on the current quarantined state of the world, a chamber drama in which the chamber is about to explode from the combustible heat of the escalating tension between the two central characters. Shot over the course of two weeks in summer 2020, the film is, at least in […]
PVT Chat
PVT Chat is well-meaning but obvious, a quasi-intriguing short film concept that uncomfortably stretches itself to feature length, oblivious to the fact that its plot is padded and its points are transparent after the first five minutes. It’s also painfully self-defeating, since this film about the psycho-sexual disconnect that can develop between media and its […]
Minor Premise
In many ways, sci-fi thriller Minor Premise feels like a throwback to early Christopher Nolan. Brainy and talky, it relies more on the thrill of discovery than the conventions of a modern-day thriller to tell its story. The movie, the feature directorial debut of Eric Shultz, centers on Ethan Kochar (Sathya Sridharan), a neuroscientist whose […]
One Night in Miami
Four icons of 1960s Black culture didn’t actually gather in a Miami hotel room on the night of February 25, 1964, to discuss important personal and societal issues, but playwright Kemp Powers’ imagined version of that meeting feels genuine. Regina King effectively adapts Powers’ One Night in Miami into a feature film (with a screenplay by […]
Wander
You’d better pray Arthur Breznik is crazy. Because otherwise, we’re in real trouble. An ex-detective with post-traumatic stress, Arthur’s currently living way off the grid and battling bad dreams and horrific hallucinations. He’s also convinced there’s a government conspiracy to kidnap people and implant them with tracking devices. But, you know, just because he’s a […]
The Top 10 Movies of 2020
In any recap of 2020, what can one say that hasn’t already been said? The ongoing global dissection of the year’s internal stresses, external vitriol, and painful events put escapism at a premium — the kind of mental getaway that movies often provide. But with theaters closed, or almost universally avoided, where does that attempt […]
Pieces of a Woman
After a few short opening scenes, Pieces of a Woman plunges the viewer into a harrowing 23-minute single-take sequence of childbirth gone wrong, as Martha (Vanessa Kirby) and her partner Sean (Shia LaBeouf) slowly realize that their home birth with midwife Eva (Molly Parker) is not going to end with the joyous event they anticipated. […]
Soul
After exploring the complex world of anthropomorphic emotions in 2015’s Inside Out, Pixar’s Pete Docter takes on the complex world of the afterlife in Soul, which deals with similarly melancholy themes. As in Inside Out, director and co-writer Docter takes on some weighty existential ideas for what is ostensibly a family-focused animated movie, and Soul […]
Promising Young Woman
How could a film this palpably angry be so gleefully entertaining? How could a film that is, ostensibly, a disturbing tragedy be so compulsively watchable? Such is the mystifying brilliance of Promising Young Woman, so deft in its navigation of conflicting styles and contradictory thematic emotions that it’s something of a miracle. Odd to feel […]