One of the most enjoyable films presented in this year’s Crossroads Festival is also one of the shortest. In Object Permanence, Alix Blevins offers the…
Like the best fiction for young children, the secret to Roald Dahl’s bibliography is its sensory qualities, that it can unlock new pathways in the…
In the first three days that doctors and patients were trapped inside Memorial Medical Center after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, the body count was around…
Dos Estaciones is packed with precise images and lensed with beautiful attention to color and mise en scène, but it fails to satisfactorily develop its ideas.…
When Robert Zemeckis set about making preparations for his adaptation of Jeff Malmberg’s 2010 documentary Marwencol, he was immediately confronted with a potentially project-killing conundrum.…
Ozon’s frivolous Fassbinder homage doesn’t quite engrave much that is substantive or memorable. Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s tragically short and tormented life has been the subject…
While not traditionally associated with the genre in the strictest sense, Robert Zemeckis has always indulged in the tropes and affects of horror even outside…
Despite his reputation as a mainstream hit-maker, Zemeckis has always had a wildly idiosyncratic relationship to both genre and film history. Not as obsessed with…
In the 2010s, something strange happened to Robert Zemeckis: he almost became respectable again. After his trilogy of mo-cap extravaganzas, he suddenly returned to, if…
After nearly a decade of directing expensive mo-cap animated films to variable box-office returns, the 2010s found Robert Zemeckis at a crossroads. The massive critical…
In spite of his standing as a widely respected pop surrealist, David Lynch’s relationship with critics and audiences has always been complicated, if not downright…
I Came By is all superficial signaling, failing to build any actual substance, subtlety, or genre thrills into weightless construction. Babak Anvari is less a…
Saloum is an absolute blast, packed with pleasant genre surprises and announcing a major new filmmaker in Jean Luc Herbulot. Part of the joy of…
“Imagination is a force that can actually manifest a reality. Don’t put limitations on yourself. Others will do that for you.” — James Cameron When…
Who Invited Them visits well-worn territory, but its novel navigation of these familiar trappings makes for an effectively discomfiting viewing experience. The Covid pandemic and…
Outside Noise is an effortlessly accomplished work, unforced and moving toward an emotional spectrum out of the reach of most filmmakers. Ted Fendt’s body of…
An inconspicuous FedEx parcel starts its journey on a desolate Texas dirt road, goes “snowbound,” and ends up in post-USSR Russia a few thousand miles…
OK, so things don’t really vanish anymore: even the most limited film release will (most likely, eventually) find its way onto some streaming service or…
Sabrina Carpenter Sabrina Carpenter’s newest album, Emails I Can’t Send, has a lot of emotions to unpack and not enough tools to do it with.…
Robert Zemeckis filmed What Lies Beneath, a ghost story set in a modern world, while on a break from Castaway, waiting for Tom Hanks to…