I’m Your Man has a clarity and vibrancy in its direction that isn’t achieved in its high-concept thematic concerns. Questions of humanity and love are pondered in I’m Your Man, a German production from director/co-writer Maria Schrader that imagines a future where realistic robotic humanoids…
Everybody’s Talking About Jamie is a reductive, self-congratulatory musical that deeply cheapens its real-life subject. Everybody’s Talking About Jamie…everybody, that is, except Amazon Studios, who have done little in the way of promoting a film they spent a great deal to acquire from Disney/Fox earlier…
Laurent Cantet stumbles badly with Arthur Rambo, a topical provocation on cancel culture and the evils of social media that feels both toothless and weirdly outdated. A filmmaker known for his humanistic approach to tales of social injustice, Cantet has always managed to find…
The Starling is merely the latest by-the-numbers “issues” flick in Theodore Melfi’s bland filmography. It seems that director Theodore Melfi has never met a subject where he felt he couldn’t sand off its rough edges and inherent coarseness and turn it into utter pablum, whether…
Antoine Fuqua has made a career out of directing populist, middlebrow fare that seeks nothing more than to entertain audiences for a few hours with slick, soulless thrills. It’s not that Fuqua is necessarily a bad filmmaker, but he’s the epitome of a competent…
Blue Bayou‘s reach for authenticity is entirely undermined by its empty, saccharine sheen of melodrama. In its broad strokes, writer-director Justin Chon’s Blue Bayou seeks to shed light on a specific miscarriage of justice that has seen thousands of children who were adopted from…
When contemplating filmmakers who would attempt to tackle a low-key relationship drama like The Wheel, Steve Pink is probably not the first name to come to mind. Granted, the man did help to co-write two of the defining comedies of the late-’90s/early 2000s —…
Writer-director Potsy Ponciroli’s Old Henry dares to go where nearly every Western in the history of the film medium has gone before. The titular Henry (Tim Blake Nelson) leads a life of solitude in the Oklahoma Territory of 1906, farming the harsh terrain with…
TMBMZM oddly tilts toward authenticity rather than camp, to disappointing results. The Manson Brothers Midnight Zombie Massacre is a title that promises a lot. For the record, the titular brothers have nothing to do with notorious serial killer, but are instead a pair of…
Filipino romantic drama Here and There opens with feisty heroine Len (Janine Gutierrez) engaging in an online war of words with the earnest and handsome Cabs (JC Santos). The time is March 2020, and Manila is in the first week of its COVID-induced lockdown.…
