André De Toth is one of the great, unsung directors of Hollywood’s Golden Age. As Fred Camper noted in a 1997 essay bemoaning his lack of stature, De Toth receives only a cursory nod in Andrew Sarris’s canonical The American Cinema, with barely a…
Madres hardly justifies the whole Blumhouse/Amazon deal, but it’s at least the best of the eight films that have come courtesy of it. Director Ryan Zaragoza’s Madres is undoubtedly the best of the second wave of Amazon/Blumhouse movies released this month, and arguably the best of any…
V/H/S/94 isn’t entirely successful, but it marks an upswing for the anthology franchise from its last entry. The first V/H/S film was a novelty, a throwback to the old-fashioned omnibus anthology features that littered the arthouse scene in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. It wasn’t a…
Black as Night is a remarkably dull vampire flick riddled with awful centrist politics. Part of the second wave of Blumhouse castoffs that have been repackaged and dumped onto Amazon Prime streaming (the first batch arrived this time last year), Maritte Lee Go’s Black as Night…
Coming Home in the Dark isn’t breaking new ground and its ending is a bit too tidy, but it’s a film that feels genuinely dangerous for most of its runtime. As more than a few commentators have noted, the specter of Michael Haneke — that…
Part of the joy of a film festival (even a virtual one) is discovering hitherto unknown talent that comes from seemingly out of nowhere with a fully-realized vision, a blast of excitement washing over you as you realize you’re watching a bold new filmmaker…
Bertrand Mandico’s new lo-fi whatsit After Blue (Dirty Paradise) is wildly ambitious, extremely beautiful, and maddeningly dull. In the film’s unspecified future, humankind has abandoned Earth and colonized a new, distant planet, After Blue. Determined to not repeat the same mistakes that lead to…
Clio Barnard’s 2010 debut film The Arbor, a documentary/fiction hybrid based on the play by acclaimed writer Andrea Dunbar, features a fascinating formal gambit in which actors lip-synced to actual archival recordings of Dunbar and her daughter, Lorraine. Barnard’s subsequent films, 2013’s The Selfish…
Copshop finds Joe Carnahan at the top of his game, with the requisite violence, humor, and plot intricacies to sell this brand of genre bombast. Thanks to pandemic-related delays, we’re being gifted (or threatened with, depending on one’s tolerance for his brand of smart-ass macho bluster)…
Shot on location in a small town on the border between Brazil & Argentina, writer/director Agustina San Martín’s To Kill the Beast occupies a woozy, liminal space between coming-of-age narrative and dreamy reverie. In her video introduction to the film, San Martín calls it…
