Writer-director Kogonada creates an immersive future world in his contemplative sci-fi drama After Yang, but he’s more interested in existential musings than in predicting the course of society. There’s little to no explanation for how long “technosapiens” have been part of everyday life, where they came from or what their functions are beyond the insular […]
Big Gold Brick
Flights of fancy, stylistic flourishes, and zany situations abound in Big Gold Brick. But for a movie that so clearly wants to come across as quirky and darkly humorous, it’s shockingly dull. The story centers on Samuel Liston (Emory Cohen), a down-on-his-luck writer who, while drunkenly stumbling down the middle of a road, is hit […]
Clairevoyant
People spend their entire lives looking for purpose, searching for meaning, trying to find some kind of answer. Well, Claire has her own existential question. Isn’t there an app for that? The perky twentysomething is the subject of the new mockumentary Clairevoyant, and the comedy comes from her clueless spiritual quest, which she’s trying to […]
Stay Awake
Filmmakers often turn to stories of addiction because they seem tailor-made for a perfect, three-act structure. Act One: A problem begins. Act Two: The protagonist hits rock bottom. Act Three: The person confronts their problem, conquers it, and begins to struggle back to normalcy. What Stay Awake realizes, though, is that in real life, a […]
Crabs!
Miss the `70s, when every Roger Corman B-movie had gratuitous nudity and pot-smoking teens? Or the `80s, when Troma Entertainment churned out exploitation flicks crammed with crude humor and over-the-top gore? Well, Crabs! brings them back, and serves them up hot – with an extra layer of cheese. Director Pierce McDermott Berolzheimer’s flick is a […]
The Final Sacrifice
Most war films are about famous campaigns, with casts of thousands – or, at least, hundreds – clashing in spectacular battle sequences, valiant armies competing to achieve a clear, if almost impossible, objective. The Final Sacrifice is not like most war films. Its cast is more accurately measured in the dozens – and even those […]
Marry Me
There’s a blissful ignorance on display throughout Marry Me that is simultaneously discomfiting and wistful, its flowery romance presented though a lens of casual globe-hopping, packed concert venues, and glitzy nights on the town. Part of that is surely because it was shot pre-pandemic, another in the long line of films that have been sitting […]
Lust, Life, Love
If you’re tired of searching for “The One,” maybe you should change your approach and be content with “The Many.” That’s the decision Veronica has come to in Lust, Life, Love. Openly bisexual, guiltlessly polyamorous, she spends her nights at organized orgies, and her days blogging about her various adventures. Mr. Right? Ms. Right? All […]
The Tiger Rising
There are more captive tigers in America than living in the wild around the globe, and a shocking number of those tigers are held as pets in backyards or exploited in roadside attractions. The title tiger in the kids’ drama The Tiger Rising, based on a bestselling book of the same name by Kate DiCamillo, […]
Scream (2022)
Ever since Scream 2 opened with the premiere of the movie-within-the-movie Stab, based on the events of the previous installment, the horror franchise has been built around references to itself. The original Scream, released in 1996, is a clever deconstruction of slasher-movie conventions that’s also a masterfully effective slasher movie on its own, thanks to the […]
The Kindred
The Kindred starts by putting viewers right into the action. A woman runs frantically out of an apartment building. She continuously glances behind her as if she’s being chased. Just as she makes it outside, a body drops to the ground in front of her. She backs away into the street in horror as she […]
Courageous Warriors: Beauty From the Ashes
The bad news came quickly. It was breast cancer. It was Stage 4. And, the doctors told her, she was not a candidate for radiation, or chemotherapy. So what can you do, the woman asked. “They told me they could keep me ‘comfortable,’” she remembers. That patient survived breast cancer, though, as did all the […]
Killing the Shepherd
If you want to save a species from extinction, kill it. That’s the counterintuitive, but intriguing, idea behind the documentary Killing the Shepherd. Set in an impoverished section of Africa, it first lays out two real-life, and truly disastrous scenarios about our vanishing wildlife. In the first, there are no rules or regulations on big-game […]
Inheritance, Italian Style
The Parlazzis would like to invite you to a big family dinner. Hope you like resentment. It’s the main course – and getting served up with sides of greed, anger, lust and depression. That’s the set up to the comic melodrama Inheritance, Italian Style which reunites a big, squabbling clan of Sicilians to divvy up […]
American Insurrection
When fascism was on the rise in ’30s Europe, Sinclair Lewis wrote a novel about a dystopian, dictatorial America, sarcastically titled It Can’t Happen Here. In American Insurrection, it already has. That title, a new one, is misleading, although commercial. (The movie was originally called The Volunteers.) Before the film even begins, an election has […]
The Top 10 Movies of 2021
2021 was The Year that New Movies Were Everywhere. Back in theaters. Premiering on Netflix. Streaming on HBO Max, a notable evolution that synced at-home WB releases with theatrical showings for 30 days. The moviegoing experience used to involve picking a movie and a moviehouse in which to see it (and snack selections, of course). […]
The King’s Man
Love them or hate them, the first two Kingsman movies, Kingsman: The Secret Service and Kingsman: The Golden Circle, reveled in a giddy, stylized brand of hyperviolence that made them stand out from more traditional spy films. However, the third entry in the franchise, The King’s Man, lacks its predecessors’ sense of irreverent fun. Part […]
The Tender Bar
The Tender Bar is a structural, tonal mess – but a damn likable one. George Clooney, directing his seventh film, leaves a sloppy trail of memories and moments in the life of writer J.R. Moehringer, who we see as a kid growing up fast on Long Island, and then as a hopeful journalist figuring out […]
Spider-Man: No Way Home
Several years ago, when it was announced that Spider-Man would be incorporated into the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s ever-expanding franchise of superheroes, it was the third time in recent memory that a new live-action version of the wall-crawler was bound for the big screen. Given the circumstances, fans could be forgiven for feeling some Spidey fatigue. […]
Nightmare Alley
Director Guillermo Del Toro is known for building dark fantasy worlds in films like The Shape of Water and Pan’s Labyrinth. His latest, Nightmare Alley, takes him to a place he’s never gone before, a story based entirely in reality. That this is a reality in which characters take advantage of the tendency of suckers […]