When Olivier Assayas’s Irma Vep came out in 1996, the brash, freewheeling experimentalism of the French New Wave was already long in the rearview. Luc Besson was pumping out reliably stylized action-thrillers like La Femme Nikita and Léon. Saccharine crowd-pleasers like Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie…
Some Kind of Heaven finds legitimate pathos within the oddball trappings of a would-be utopian retirement community. From the cold and gloomy vantage of New York’s post-pandemic winter, a chance to escape into a sunny, pre-Covid Florida sure sounds tempting. Watching Lance Oppenheim’s Some Kind…
The Ultimate Playlist of Noise abandons an interesting conceit for a far more staid one but still manages to be charming enough in spurts. Sound of Metal meets The Perks of Being a Wallflower in The Ultimate Playlist of Noise, Hulu’s new teen dramedy that chronicles a…
The Dig is a gorgeous effort but entirely sidelines the fascinating psychological and emotional terrain implicit to its narrative. Every niche interest deserves its own movie. By this, I don’t just mean mere on-screen representation, but rather a film or series that really interrogates the…
Outside the Wire boasts enough requisite action fodder to keep things moving, but in failing to meaningfully develop any of its ideas, become little more than a rah-rah recruitment film. January has long been an annual dumping ground, giving studios a chance to quietly release…
Locked Down wants to be the film of this pandemic moment but is instead tiresomely repetitive, tonally chaotic, and already outdated. A January 6th puff piece from Variety lays out the wildly accelerated production schedule of the new Covid-19 heist-comedy Locked Down, detailing how director…
The Marksman is a sturdy and uncomplicated but mostly satisfying entry into the Neeson oeuvre of stoic, righteous masculinity. Another exercise in stoicism and dignified masculinity, replete with a dash of reactionary violence and a grizzled lead performance? Smells like a Liam Neeson movie. In…
Hunted isn’t a bad film, but the genre aficionados who are likely to seek it out won’t find much genre styling to sustain them. Vincent Paronnaud’s new horror-thriller Hunted opens with a campfire tale brought to life using a gorgeous animation style that combines black,…
Imagine my surprise when a cursory online search revealed that virtually no critic of note has written a modern reassessment of the 1986 serial-killer-road-movie cum neo-western The Hitcher. Barely released into theaters, the film was a financial failure and was roundly eviscerated by critics —…
The timely and harrowing MLK/FBI explores a particular American history that isn’t so safely in the past. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is now a near-universally revered and beloved historical icon, but as Sam Pollard’s meticulous and quietly infuriating documentary MLK/FBI shows,…
