Promotional materials for Audrey Estrougo’s Suprême NTM biopic — imaginatively titled Suprêmes — notes La Haine, Les Misérables, and Straight Outta Compton as reference points for its temper and content. As such things go, it’s actually not a bad triangulation, assuming you don’t overestimate…
Pig isn’t the Nic Cage film you’re expecting — it’s better. It’s tough to recall a recent film — particularly outside the auteur context — that announces itself with as much clarity as Pig. The film stars Nicolas Cage as a curmudgeonly hermit on the…
Depending on your perspective — and depending on the film — Andrea Arnold’s cinema vacillates between kitsch and kitchen sink, her intended brand of (dour) social realism sliding easily into fussy melodrama. Fish Tank’s over-seriousness marks one end of her spectrum, American Honey’s campier…
Episode Description: This week, as Pride Month comes to a close, we take on a landmark film in the gay cinema canon, 1990’s Longtime Companion, directed by Norman René. The first mainstream movie to tackle the AIDS epidemic, we discuss if this gentle ensemble…
Fathom sidesteps plenty of nature documentary pratfalls, but fails to develop a distinctive voice of its own. In the wake of Planet Earth’s zeitgeist arrival in 2006 and DisneyNature’s subsequent founding a short two years later, the nature documentary — and, increasingly, docu-series —…
There’s a scene midway through Levan Koguashvili’s Brighton 4th in which the film’s elderly protagonist, Khaki, explains to his sister-in-law that his health won’t allow him to work construction, only to immediately insist that she clamber onto his back so that he can prove…
Dating & New York, Jonah Feingold’s feature debut after working in shorts and television for the past decade, is a film built from the scraps of its evident influences. The window dressing here immediately recalls Wes Anderson: the film opens with (and sustains) a…
Integrating the texture of noir into a feminist revenge flick — tilting towards, but not exactly near an exploitation film — Catch the Fair One mines discursive topicality in its tale of a female boxer, Kaylee (real-life world champion Kali Reis in her debut,…
Episode Description: This week, we take on 1997’s extremely bizarre true-life tale Buddy, directed by Caroline Thompson. Rene Russo plays an animal-loving socialite who accepts a gorilla into her home. Once grown, she dresses it in a three-piece suit and basically forces it to…
At this point, it’s fairly useless to ascribe Studio Ghibli qualities to any new anime release, so diluted have such comparisons become, but there’s an undeniable touch of that familiar eco fabulism to Studio 4°C’s latest, Poupelle of Chimney Town. Based on a children’s…
