The Ross Brothers’ latest is a uniquely heady, tonally dexterous work that operates at the intersection of documentary and fiction. An official selection of this year’s Sundance U.S. Documentary Competition, Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets chronicles the final business day of a Las Vegas dive,…
The Old Guard navigates familiar genre terrain but with enough punch to put the hetero white male actioner ethos on notice. Every big-budget action flick should be as effortlessly entertaining as The Old Guard. Written by Greg Rucka, adapted from his own comic book co-created…
Ever since H.G. Wells unleashed The Time Machine upon the world in 1895, artists have used the conceit to impart important life lessons, waxing broadly on everything from mortality to regret to the meaning of existence. Wells was the first to offer a science-based…
The summer of 1996 saw the release of three huge blockbusters that would in one way or another influence the next 20 odd years of Hollywood filmmaking. Twister revived the moribund eco-disaster picture, while Mission: Impossible gave global superstar Tom Cruise his very own (ongoing) action franchise. The…
More comparable to Walerian Borowczyk than any other well-known Polish filmmaker, Andrzej Zulawski never really gained more than a dedicated cult following during his career. Even Possession, a disturbing classic of the horror genre, remains underappreciated by mainstream audiences. The film is set in…
There is more than a bit of irony to be found in the fact that the new Will Ferrell/Netflix comedy Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga is being released in 2020, the first year since the singing competition’s inception in 1956 that…
You Don’t Nomi is a clear-headed, surprisingly intelligent documentary with a lot more than lurid celebration on its mind. Jeffrey McHale’s documentary You Don’t Nomi takes a hard look at one of the biggest critical and box office bombs of the 1990s, Paul Verhoeven’s notorious…
MS Slavic 7 is an ambiguous, mechanistic work that seeks to understand the divide (and bridge) between passion and scholarship. Sofia Bohdanowicz and Deragh Campbell’s low-key, documentary-style drama MS Slavic 7 is about a young woman, Audrey (Campbell), who discovers her late, great-grandmother Zofia Bohdanowiczowa’s…
A director in tune with the material, and one willing to upset coming-of-age tropes, makes House of Hummingbird a surprising find. The feature directorial debut from filmmaker Bora Kim, House of Hummingbird has finally been released after a lengthy festival run where it generated…
Overly reliant on metaphorical contrivance and signaled emotionality, Babyteeth fails to transcend its archetypal narrative. An unadorned tale of woe, grief, angst, love, mortality, and familial hardship, Shannon Murphy’s Babyteeth struggles to create any sense of cohesiveness in either theme or narrative through-line. Haphazardly…
