With direct-to-video/streaming action films now a bonafide cottage industry with their own tropes, star filmmakers and performers, and aesthetic trappings, the real mediocrities are becoming more and more prominent and are seemingly attracting a classier pedigree of talent. Hence, The Doorman. It stars Australian…
Trump Card was always going to be pathetic, but it surprises in demonstrating new lows of argumentation and cohesion from its soft-minded director. Dinesh D’Souza has, somehow, once again, outdone himself. Not in terms of his technical prowess or his ability to skillfully assemble a…
Laura Gabbert has a knack for pairing gastronomy and film — as in her 2016 documentary, City of Gold, which profiles Jonathan Gold, the first food critic to win a Pulitzer Prize. Gabbert’s latest, Ottolenghi and the Cakes of Versailles, follows renowned Israeli chef…
Pierre Cardin, indisputably, is one of the most iconic names in the realm of fashion — known to many as a genius, a hyper-modernist, an avant-garde designer. Italian-born but France-based, Cardin helped to revolutionize fashion in the ‘60s and ‘70s with his futuristic, unconventional…
One of 2020’s greatest mysteries is how a film like Guest House received funding? Ostensibly conceived as a star vehicle for the Laurence Olivier of ‘90s high-concept comedies — which could only ever refer to former MTV VJ Pauly Shore — perhaps the producers…
Rent-a-Pal, the debut feature from writer-director-editor Jon Stevenson, is unrelentingly bleak, a 108-minute cringe-fest masquerading as a character study. Not that there is much to glean from the protagonist as presented here, a bespectacled sad sack named David (Brian Landis Folkins) desperate for human…
Space Dogs finds directors Elsa Kremser and Levin Peter misty-eyed and looking up at the stars, convening mythologies surrounding the Space Race. But the filmmakers also take moments to look down — at the descendants of wolves running amok through the streets of Moscow,…
The long-standing theoretical association made between watching cinema and being in a dream-like state is one that’s rooted in a firm misunderstanding about the autonomy of the viewing public, seeming to suggest that an audience member is a sort of malleable object — one…
Kris Rey’s latest has moments that delight, but the final product feels distinctly undercooked. Kris Rey (formerly known as Kris Swanberg) is no stranger to female-driven slice-of-life narratives that tackle relationship issues, professional aspirations, and general day-to-day struggles. The director has successfully mined this…
The Pale Door is a tonally mismanaged botch job that unsuccessfully cribs from stronger genre entries. There’s a bit of a shared cinematic history between the Wild West outlaw archetype and women accused of witchcraft and demonic sorcery — the wicked witches, if you will.…
