There’s a potentially great movie buried in Encounter, one that Pearce scuttles in service of a high concept that goes mostly nowhere. Riz Ahmed has made a well-deserved leap from character actor to leading man status in his recent work, beginning with the prestige…
A Castle for Christmas is the latest Netflix attempt to ape the Hallmark holiday game, but you’d be better off with a lump of coal. Director Mary Lambert is responsible for some of the most iconic and cutting-edge music videos of the ‘80s, including Madonna’s “Material Girl”…
Potentially useful as pedagogical sledgehammer, Burning unfortunately isn’t much of an aesthetic object. Vividly illustrating Australia’s devastating “Black Summer” wildfires, which raged off and on from June 2019 into May 2020, Eva Orner‘s new non-fiction film Burning attempts to document a horrific event while engaging with…
Isolation is a contrived gimmick flick that shoehorns in topical fodder without nuance or authenticity. Isolation, a horror anthology co-produced by James P. Gannon and Nathan Crooker, is made of nine shorts created and set in life during the pandemic. They’re mostly dead on arrival,…
Night at the Eagle Inn is a 2-star destination you’re better off driving right past. Brothers Erik and Carson Bloomquist might just be the hardest working filmmakers in show business right now, and chances are you have never even heard of them. Their latest feature,…
Beans offers good intentions and not much else, demonstrating neither the polish nor dramatic bona fides to pull off such a serious true-life treatment. It wouldn’t be a film festival without the requisite, ham-fisted coming-of-age drama, and for the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival, Tracey…
Unstuck in Time offers intimate portraiture of its subject without ever resorting to apologia or hagiography. In 1982, a young Robert B. Weide wrote to his literary idol with a proposal for a documentary. Twenty-five years later, the writer Kurt Vonnegut died as the result…
She Paradise abandons the physicality at its core for an unfortunate bit of dubious messaging. Lost in the anonymous aesthetic swarm that is digital, independent filmmaking, She Paradise, directed by Maya Cozier, oscillates between trope and something more benevolent, before abruptly undercutting its quiet subterfuge…
Clerk plays out like a love letter from Smith to himself, not offering much for the rest of us involved in the film-watching process. For movie nerds of a certain age, the story of Kevin Smith and his 1994 debut film, Clerks, is the stuff…
Dangerous is content to ride its plateaued production structure of cribbed parts to the territory of who cares. When speaking of Dangerous, it’s difficult to not make the most immediate Die Hard reference when the film, itself, seems comfortable enough luxuriating in that very pastiche. Like…