Agnès Varda’s documentaries have often incorporated her immediate periphery – friends (Jane B. by Agnès V.), family (Uncle Yanco), neighbors (Diary of a Pregnant Woman, Daguerreotypes), or strangers she finds particularly interesting (The Gleaners and I, Faces Places). While she often takes part in the films…
At this point, the Disney live action remake is a fact of life, a part of the current moviegoing landscape as ubiquitous as superheroes and unwanted remakes. So far, their quality has ranged from solid (Cinderella) to unnecessary (The Lion King) to dreadful (Aladdin).…
Scott Aukerman’s Between Two Ferns: The Movie barely qualifies as a movie, in much the same way that Between Two Ferns barely qualifies as a TV show. The long running Funny or Die sketch featuring Zach Galifianakis as a hilariously inept local access celebrity…
There’s nothing particularly new in Joe Penna’s survival drama Arctic. But the director’s gritty, hard-edged vision of human resilience strikes a primal chord that other similarly themed films do not. For a movie that’s essentially Cast Away by way of The Revenant, Arctic eschews…
Amy Poehler‘s Wine Country barely qualifies as a movie – it’s essentially a vacation slideshow featuring a who’s who of industry funny women. Much like Alexander Payne’s Sideways but recast with middle-aged women, Wine Country finds a group of former co-workers out on a wine tour in the…
In the 2018 election, more women, and specifically women of color, ran for elected office than ever before. Many of these women were progressives running grassroots campaigns against establishment Democrats, advocating for what they consider to be real progressive change in the face of…
With the public’s appetite for true crime reaching seemingly insatiable levels, Netflix has gone all-in on serial killer Ted Bundy, releasing the four-part documentary Conversations With a Serial Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes and Bundy biopic Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile within months of each…
Film history is chock full of men falling in love with the ‘whore with a heart of gold,’ either to the effect of their own ruin (Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel), the ruin of the woman (Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge!), or, less likely,…
World cinema has come a long way in the last two decades when it comes to queer representation in film. Yet despite the growing amount of films that tell queer love stories without playing into old-fashioned ‘kill your gays’ tropes, transgender stories remain woefully…
The directorial debut of Ghanan filmmaker Sam Blitz Bazawule takes a while to get where it’s going; the plot synopsis of the 80-minute film that’s floating around the internet really only describes the last 20 or so minutes. The Burial of Kojo is ostensibly about…
