The Last Blockbuster is little more than a celebrity-filled version of the same conversation you have with your friends when reminiscing about the “good ole days” of pre-Internet movie renting. Corporate nostalgia gets quite a workout in The Last Blockbuster, Taylor Morden’s breezy documentary on…
The Very Excellent Mr. Dundee delivers what no one was asking for — a film featuring an octogenarian Paul Hogan and a litany of senior citizen cameos delivering dated references and lazy jokes with no payoff. The Very Excellent Mr. Dundee is a strange film…
Billie offers a look at one complex woman through the lens of another, each with a distinct story that director James Erskine manages to weave into an impressive if unambitious narrative. In February 1978, young arts writer and journalist Linda Lipnack Kuehl was found…
Minor Premise boasts classic sci-fi origins, but is largely a shamble of ill-fitting elements that fails to build to anything cohesive or appealing. One of the science fiction genre’s most enduring fascinations has been with memory and its plasticine architecture — better endowed in a…
Julia Hart shows promise but ultimately disappoints with I’m Your Woman, a film attempting to flip the crime genre on its head but only ending up on the ground itself. The goals of I’m Your Woman are obvious. By pushing the criminal men to the…
Hunter Hunter begins as a simple look at a family living off-the-grid, but quickly develops into a gory thriller that isn’t for the faint of heart. It wouldn’t be entirely correct to call the new survival-thriller film Hunter Hunter a bait-and-switch; there’s no twist, exactly,…
Finding Yingying smartly avoids its early promise of true-crime procedural in favor of something more rawly emotional. Mere weeks after her arrival in the United States, Yingying Zhang, a visiting scholar from Peking University, went missing and was presumed dead. An avid agricultural student with…
Dear Santa succeeds in encouraging an emotional response, but does in the most manipulative of fashions. Documentary filmmaker Dana Nachman strikes again. Her latest effort, Dear Santa, is a film that, much like past efforts Batkid Begins and Pick of the Litter, seems to exist…
Kill It and Leave This Town is an impressive technical achievement and often stunning, but its central nihilism is oppressing and is bloated at feature length. Although their cinematic cachet may have diminished since their heyday, animated films have always been a prominent form of…
Songbird is a well-directed but otherwise bland, opportunistic bit of pablum. The press materials for the new COVID thriller Songbird spill a lot of ink on the filmmakers patting themselves on the back for creating a movie about “hope” and “resilience” in the middle of…
