Villeneuve’s Dune is a gorgeous, monumental, and thrilling take on Herbert’s material, only slightly hampered by a weak finale that anticipates an intended Part Two. It’s the year 10,191. Interstellar space travel (and therefore the known universe) is dependent on a substance called Spice, which can…
Night Teeth is a generic, derivative DTV trifle that fails to make its vampire story vampy enough. Onto the heap of DTV detritus you can now toss Night Teeth, a wildly generic, timidly un-exciting modern-day vampires-in-LA jalopy that’s just completely undistinguished, right down to it’s…
The Last Duel is another win for Scott, an agreeably brutal, wickedly incisive tale that is considerably more substantive than mere Rashomon comps. Blending his lavish but gritty historical epics like Gladiator or Kingdom of Heaven with the sorta-high-concept pop feminism of G.I. Jane or Thelma…
The Blazing World is a disarmingly charmless and amateurish series of indie genre check-boxes that amounts to a whole lot of nothing. With horror films in general and especially as they are increasingly mired in slow-cinema formalism and banal explorations of trauma and representation without…
No Time to Die is a gorgeous entry in the Bond canon, but abysmally paced and expository to a fault. After 15 years, Daniel Craig’s run as James Bond comes to an end in No Time to Die, and while it’s an ambitious (and sure…
Irish teen Char (Hazel Doupe) lives in a North Dublin housing estate with her Grandmother Rita (Ingrid Craigie), her uncle Aaron (Paul Reid) and, most importantly, her clearly troubled mother Angela (Carolyn Bracken), who appears to be in the throes of some sort of…
The Card Counter takes a similar shape to many of Schrader’s Lonely Man films, but this latest can’t quite overcome the template and thrive on its own merits. Oscar Isaac is William Tell (a self-applied pseudonym), former soldier, and ex-con. He patrols the country…
Kate isn’t doing anything new from an action-narrative perspective, but slick choreography and gleeful violence helps this girlboss brutality go down smoothly. Kate, a female assassin (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) discovers she’s been poisoned and has less than 24 hours to prowl the neon-lit streets…
In Barbarian Invasion, retired actress Moon Lee (Tan Chui Mui, who also directs), not to be confused with actual retired martial arts actress Moon Lee, is now a divorced single mother looking to do a bit of personal reclamation and regain her former sense…
The end of the Edo period in Japan in 1867 was basically the end of the samurai era, and has, accordingly, been the inspiration for countless films. The Pass: Last Days of the Samurai focuses in particular on events during the Boshin War that…
