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 […]
Author: Josh Bell
The Dark and the Wicked
When The Strangers was released in 2008, it looked like the beginning of a major horror career for writer-director Bryan Bertino, who created one of the most intense, unsettling movies of the past 20 years. But Bertino struggled to follow up his initial success and to recapture the acclaim of his debut. It was six […]
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 […]
Clouds
Actor turned director Justin Baldoni must really have a thing for the love lives of terminally ill teens, which have been the subject of both of his feature films thus far. After making his directorial debut with the 2019 weepie Five Feet Apart, about a romance between two teens with cystic fibrosis, Baldoni returns with […]
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 […]
The War With Grandpa
The sight of Robert De Niro debasing himself in a moronic slapstick comedy barely even evokes a response anymore, so his presence in The War With Grandpa isn’t offensive, just depressing. Based on a 1984 novel by Robert Kimmel Smith, The War With Grandpa features De Niro in grumpy old man mode as Ed, an […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
The Broken Hearts Gallery
The current resurgence in romantic comedies has come mainly via streaming services, especially Netflix, which has developed a familiar house style with pleasant, engaging movies like Set It Up and To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before. So it’s a little odd to see small-scale romantic comedy The Broken Hearts Gallery get a full theatrical […]
Bill & Ted Face the Music
It’s been nearly 30 years since we saw heavy metal doofuses Bill and Ted onscreen, and while 1989’s Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure has grown into a genuine classic (and 1991’s Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey has a substantial following, too), that’s no guarantee that a return for these characters in middle age would make […]
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 […]
I Used to Go Here
For I Used to Go Here’s Kate Conklin (Gillian Jacobs), life has not turned out the way that she hoped that it would. She’s broken up with her fiancé (even as an entire box of wedding invitations arrives at her apartment), and while her first novel has just been released, sales and reviews are not […]
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 […]
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 […]
The King of Staten Island
In films like 2009’s Funny People and 2012’s This Is 40, director Judd Apatow drew heavily from his own personal life, spearheading a movement in movie comedy toward more earnest emotional expression (along with a heavy reliance on improvisation). The more successful Apatow has become, the more he’s shifted away from writing and directing movies […]
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, […]
How to Build a Girl
British writer Caitlin Moran has mined her family background for multiple projects, and she returns to that well again for How to Build a Girl, the film adaptation of her 2014 semi-autobiographical novel. Inspired both by Moran’s chaotic upbringing and by her brief stint in the ’90s as a teenage music journalist for Melody Maker, […]