When I was 22, my best friend and I lived together for a while in the apartment where I grew up. We were a twenty-minute walk from the subway’s last stop, in a neighborhood that was years away from any semblance of trendiness. My…
Exodus tantalizes with the possibility of incisive critique, but ultimately paints a fairly empty picture. Exodus, the debut feature by cinematographer-turned-director Logan Stone, is a peculiarly insular version of a standard post-apocalyptic thriller. Stone’s vision of America seven years after the Rapture is nearly indistinguishable…
Moon, 66 Questions, the debut feature from Greek director Jacqueline Lentzou, opens with a series of grainy home video clips with dates from roughly 25 years ago imprinted in the top left corner. In voiceover, a young woman named Artemis (Sofia Kokkali) tells a…
The myth of Orpheus seems to tell us that in the face of overwhelming grief, the hardest thing to do is have faith that things will get better. Grief-stricken after the death of his wife, he seeks out Hades himself and is told: Eurydice…
Space Sweepers boasts of welcome vein of social commentary but is hampered by endless plot convolutions and a pivot into cheap platitudes. Man first walked on the moon a little over 50 years ago, and since then, we’ve already managed to fill the cosmos with…
In and Of Itself isn’t without its small hypocrisies, but ultimately surprises by delivering spectacle through its big heart and humanism. From 2016 to 2018, the illusionist and performer Derek DelGaudio ran a one-man show in New York and Los Angeles called In & Of…
When Olivier Assayas’s Irma Vep came out in 1996, the brash, freewheeling experimentalism of the French New Wave was already long in the rearview. Luc Besson was pumping out reliably stylized action-thrillers like La Femme Nikita and Léon. Saccharine crowd-pleasers like Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie…
Soul is another complex, cosmic effort from Pixar, and a quietly joyous send-off to a relentlessly bleak year. It makes a certain sense to end 2020, a year of profound uncertainty, by asking ourselves what it all means. Why are we here and does any…
Freaky is a playful and genuinely funny ’90s slasher revamp that boasts both surprising commentary and appropriately gnarly kill thrills. There’s a lot to like about director Christopher Landon’s latest feature, Freaky, in which a bullied high schooler named Millie Kessler (Kathryn Newton) swaps bodies…
A Babysitter’s Guide to Monster Hunting is an old-school, family-friendly romp of pleasing, lightweight horror. Adapted from the eponymous trilogy of YA novels by Joe Ballarini, Rachel Talalay’s A Babysitter’s Guide to Monster Hunting is a zippy entry in Netflix’s Halloween catalog. Talalay’s credits include…
