Could there possibly be anything more boring than a supposed spy thriller where the main character wins all the time and is immediately right with every hunch? That’s the experience of watching American Assassin’s Mitch Rapp (Dylan O’Brien), a character who is devoid of real personality so he can more fully embody the many contradictory […]
The film adaptation of Stephen King’s novel IT, long considered unfilmable, has finally reached the big screen, bringing new life and a modern sensibility to a story that is simultaneously nostalgic and damning of selective memory. The decades are swapped—our heroes are growing up in the late 1980s instead of King’s 1950s—but the coulrophobia has […]
Madcap francophone antics and lanky physical comedy are served aplenty in Lost in Paris, the new film from co-writers, co-directors, co-stars and spouses Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon. Even without knowing that bit of information about the film’s co-creators, it is clear that the pair constructed the cinematography, set pieces, physical humor and punchlines around […]
The impact of An Inconvenient Truth, the award-winning film released in 2006, was almost unprecedented for a documentary. There had already been a conversation around climate change, but many advocates and people generally in favor of promoting the notion that it was human-supported often lacked cohesion. One could always cite scientific consensus, but before director […]
Not a single aspect of Wind River is easy to endure, but every shot, frame, line of dialogue, standoff and underlying theme is indispensable. The film turns every convention on its head in a plot involving a murder on a Native American reservation—the investigation is not depicted as a mystery, but implores both its characters […]
Who would have known a prequel series to a reboot of a movie based on a book based on a hoax would boast some of the most delightful big-budget horror filmmaking in recent memory? The Annabelle series is one that should not work; kids, spooky dolls and overexplained mythologies are typically the undoing of any […]
The push for greater representation in cinema, both in front of and behind the camera, is sometimes derided as an academic one that places statistics ahead of quality, of checked boxes over realism. What these critics miss is that representation means greater diversity of perspectives. People of different races, nationalities, genders, religions and sexual orientations […]
Whether it gets the acknowledgment it deserves, we are currently in what might be called a golden age of action filmmaking. Aside from the superhero flicks that seem to be holding the industry afloat, the last few years have seen sea changes in the genre’s presence in the culture. There are the high-profile blockbusters like […]
Bong Joon-ho is back once again with Okja, a parable that goes to stylistic extremes to make an existential argument, broadcasting the film’s central metaphor from the very first scene while being far more emotionally and politically trenchant than anticipated. Snowpiercer could have been a straightforward action/sci-fi yarn, but in his hands, it becomes a […]
The release of films in select theaters and on demand simultaneously may be good news for cinephiles in overlooked parts of the country, but the experience of watching a movie as intensely visual and stylistically unrelenting as The Bad Batch can’t help but be diminished as a result. Nothing is different about the composition—every shot […]