“Sweet” and “gentle” are two unlikely descriptors with which to anoint a Seth Rogen flick (outside of the Kung Fu Panda series), and yet their application absolutely fits the comedian’s latest venture, HBO’s An American Pickle. Advertised as a raucous, high-concept comedy, featuring Rogen…
Archive is a lame rehash of half a century’s worth of sci-fi tropes. The new futuristic thriller Archive is aptly titled, as it feels like a pastiche of every major sci-fi film of the past four decades. While writer-director Gavin Rothery — making his feature…
Jenny Slate is a gift to the world. The Sunlit Night is not. The world does not deserve Jenny Slate, nor does The Sunlit Night, an inconsequential film adaptation of the 2016 critically-acclaimed novel by Rebecca Dinerstein Knight. It’s quite baffling, then, to learn that Knight…
Hirokazu Kore-eda feels distinctly uninterested in his own material here, a sentiment sure to be echoed by audiences. Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda has consistently shown an affinity for highlighting the often fractured dynamics that exist within families both real and manufactured, from 1995’s Maborosi to 2018’s Palme d’Or-winning Shoplifters.…
Ever since H.G. Wells unleashed The Time Machine upon the world in 1895, artists have used the conceit to impart important life lessons, waxing broadly on everything from mortality to regret to the meaning of existence. Wells was the first to offer a science-based…
There is more than a bit of irony to be found in the fact that the new Will Ferrell/Netflix comedy Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga is being released in 2020, the first year since the singing competition’s inception in 1956 that…
You Don’t Nomi is a clear-headed, surprisingly intelligent documentary with a lot more than lurid celebration on its mind. Jeffrey McHale’s documentary You Don’t Nomi takes a hard look at one of the biggest critical and box office bombs of the 1990s, Paul Verhoeven’s notorious…
Spike Lee’s newest joint, Da 5 Bloods, makes perfectly clear its influences when, within the first five minutes, the camera pans out from a giant poster of Francis Ford Coppola’s classic Vietnam War treatise Apocalypse Now, itself a spin on Joseph Conrad’s high school…
The unfortunate irony of Porno is that it fails to leave its audience satisfied. If you are naming your new indie horror flick Porno, you had better make damn sure you deliver on the grindhouse expectations that undoubtedly live within the minds of its…
Driveways feels like a relic from another era, an aughts-era indie drama already past its expiration date. An air of melancholy hangs heavy over Andrew Ahn’s genteel suburban drama Driveways, some of which can be attributed to its themes of loss and forgiveness, but…
