Mank is a listless, conventional story of embattled genius, safely told from behind a scrim of sentimentality. In her notorious New Yorker article “Raising Kane,” which essentially argued that screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz deserved full recognition for penning Citizen Kane (as opposed to sharing credit with Orson Welles), Pauline Kael wrote that “the movie industry was frightened of reprisals,” while also parenthetically observing that “The movie industry is always frightened, and is always proudest of films that celebrate courage.” Kael was…
Superintelligence undermines its innocuous silliness and any potential rom-com aspirations with needlessly complicated stakes and a fixation on its own high concept. There’s a genuinely charming romantic comedy hiding somewhere within the edges of Superintelligence,…
- by InRO Staff Music
Ledger Line | Q3 2020 Issue — Part 2: Microphones, Julianna Barwick, Bill Callahan
Microphones The unfolding biography of Phil Elverum’s life — which he has for years been telling under his Mount Eerie moniker, most exceptionally in a trilogy of albums released between 2017 and 2019 —…
Happiest Season is trite, platitude-heavy Christmas offering that fails on nearly every front. Five years ago, when Todd Haynes’ Carol hit theaters, a moment was marked in which the worlds of queer cinema and the Christmas film…
OK, so things don’t really vanish anymore: even the most limited film release will (most likely, eventually) find its way onto some streaming service or into some DVD bargain bin assuming that those still…
In Wonder is an unfortunately empty, depthless bit of underwhelming, barely cinematic fan service. Who is Shawn Mendes? For anyone over the age of 25, that question is probably quite literal; for the 22-year-old Canadian…
The Chicks In her Netflix documentary Miss Americana, Taylor Swift admits to long viewing the Dixie Chicks as a cautionary tale. Referencing their anti-Bush comments from the height of the Iraq War, and their…
Between the World in Me capitalizes on the power and poetry of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ words but contributes considerably less as a visual document. Published in 2015, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me is a…
Run could have been a bit of delightful trash but is instead a disaster of mismanaged tone. Let’s be very clear about one thing, just so there’s no confusion going forward: Run, the new…
Mangrove too often gets lost in its dusty courtroom formula, but it at least boasts a human center that contrasts with the film’s trial spectacle. Steve McQueen has spent the last decade making films that…
- by Ayeen Forootan Film Streaming Scene
Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on The Exorcist | Alexandre O. Phillippe
Leap of Faith is a fascinating fireside-style docu-chat that affords William Friedkin the space to freeform story-tell. It’s a particular challenge (if not entirely futile endeavor) to write about films that so vividly manifest through…
