Posted in: Review

Wolfwalkers

Irish animation studio Cartoon Saloon started making movies on a small scale with 2009’s The Secret of Kells, a gorgeously illustrated fable inspired by Irish folklore, and the company has grown in size and reputation over the course of its first three features, all of which were nominated for the Best Animated Feature Oscar. Wolfwalkers […]

Posted in: Review

Chasing Einstein

Even nearly 70 years after his death, Albert Einstein is still likely to be one of the top answers (along with, presumably, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye the Science Guy) if the average person is asked to name a famous scientist. But there have been decades of further advancement on Einstein’s theories by dozens […]

Posted in: Review

Spark: A Burning Man Story

Even back in 2012, the annual Burning Man gathering (organizers prefer not to call it a “festival”) was experiencing serious growing pains, and the event has only gotten bigger and more unwieldy since then. It’s also gotten much more famous and influential, and the 2013 documentary Spark: A Burning Man Story provides an interesting snapshot of […]

Posted in: Review

Yellow Rose

Rose Garcia (Eva Noblezada) is a teenager growing up in Austin, Texas, with a love for country music and a dream of writing and performing her own country songs. She’s also an illegal immigrant from the Philippines, brought over to the U.S. by her mother Priscilla (Princess Punzalan) when she was a small child, living […]

Posted in: Review

Give or Take

An aimless man in his 30s leaves the big city where he works at a corporate job and heads back to his small hometown for the funeral of a close family member. There, he reconnects with old friends, reassesses his priorities and learns to appreciate a quieter, slower way of life. It’s the plot of […]

Posted in: Review

On the Rocks

Sofia Coppola may have downgraded her ambitions with her seventh feature, On the Rocks, but that doesn’t mean she’s come close to selling out. A gentle comedy about the rocky relationship between a father and daughter, On the Rocks feels like a personal story, and there’s a temptation to search for a reflection of Coppola’s relationship […]

Posted in: Review

Possessor

David Cronenberg hasn’t made a movie since 2014’s Maps to the Stars, but his son Brandon has taken up his legacy of calculated, disturbing body horror in the intervening years. Brandon Cronenberg’s new film Possessor feels very much like the kind of movie his dad would have made, while also forging its own distinct path. […]

Posted in: Review

Antebellum

For its first 40 minutes or so, Antebellum is virtually indistinguishable from a standard historical drama about the Civil War-era South. On a cotton plantation somewhere in the South, there are cruel masters who berate and abuse the slaves, while the slaves conspire in hushed whispers with each other to plan an escape that may […]

Posted in: Review

The Personal History of David Copperfield

It’s unlikely that anyone would ever characterize a Charles Dickens novel as breezy, but that’s exactly the impression that comes from Armando Iannucci’s Dickens adaptation The Personal History of David Copperfield. Iannucci and co-writer Simon Blackwell attempt to include as much of Dickens’ 800-plus-page novel as possible into a two-hour film, turning the sprawling epic […]

Posted in: Review

Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga

The Eurovision Song Contest is inherently goofy, which proves to be a problem for the attempt to parody it in Netflix original movie Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga. The annual event features countries across Europe (and beyond) competing with original songs performed in over-the-top production numbers, and it’s a celebration of unabashedly […]

Posted in: Review

In Bright Axiom

It’s entirely possible (and even likely) that quite a lot of the material in Spencer McCall’s documentary In Bright Axiom is complete hokum. The movie itself is a chronicle of hokum, documenting the performance art project and alternate reality game known as Latitude, created by Bay Area artist and entrepreneur Jeff Hull. Hull’s work was […]

Posted in: Commentary

Interview: Soundwave Director Dylan Narang

Writer-director Dylan Narang came to the film business by way of a stint in military counter-intelligence and an MBA from Georgetown, before attending film school at Chapman University and making his feature debut with the 2016 horror movie All I Need. His latest film is the sci-fi thriller Soundwave, starring Hunter Doohan as Ben Boyles, […]

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