Wet Hot American Summer earned a well-deserved place in the enduring cultural zeitgeist, both because of its audacious, devil-may-care flavor of humor and because it…
Ever since Terrence Malick pretty much pulled it off with The Tree of Life, every few years another auteur — usually in the sci-fi idiom…
An old army colleague of mine, Colonel Cosgrove, wept today. He wept at a world so crude and bleak. “Could it be,” his red eyes…
I’d promised myself to buy one book by a French author when perusing the tourist-heavy English language-friendly bookstores in Paris, and, while of course I…
You might not know Nick Corirossi, but if you’ve spent enough time in alt-comedy circles, you may have heard of his alter-ego. “Bug Mane” is…
“What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and…
The Bluff isn’t the same kind of pirate film as Pirates of the Caribbean. Unlike the leviathan Disney franchise, The Bluff has very little seafaring,…
Allow this writer to save you some time: Baz Luhrmann’s EPiC, a concert film made in the wake of the eponymous director’s newfound (and lucrative)…
Content warning: this piece mentions Imperial Japan’s sexual violence. In Yasuzo Masumura’s Black Test Car (1962), the director revisits ideas from his earlier Giants and…
Bebe Go’s 11 starts with a concession: “in february 2020, i received a grant to make a feature film,” reads its lime-green title cards. “the…
One day there will be a knock on the door and it’ll be me. …
Occasionally something enters the streaming/DTV action space that genuinely merits curiosity, even when the project doesn’t quite live up to its potential. Marking a perfect…
Beware the multi-hyphenate. Though there are plenty of examples of cross-disciplinary artists who are successful in more than one realm, it’s worth treating the feature…
In those chilly days of the Romantic poet, Samuel Coleridge sought to distinguish two synonyms. What is imagination, and what is fancy? He had this…
Isaac Florentine is still considered one of the old-school best of the DTV action directors. He’s credited with helping to popularize the format with his…
A surprisingly faithful retelling of the Ealing Studios comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets (although one has to dig around in the film’s credits to confirm…
The final act of Matt Johnson’s 2023 comedy Blackberry — one of the best films of its year, and this half decade — opens with…
“Look at its body,” Melanie Griffith commands with a bawdy dip in vocal tone. The ‘80s icon, star of capitalist fable Working Girl and voyeuristic…
The increasingly familiar annual Chinese New Year release slate tends now to arrive with two separate guarantees: the first, assured box office success; and the…
In Kevin and Matthew McManus’ Redux Redux, Irene Kelly (Michaela McManus) vaults through an endless sequence of parallel realities, searching for a universe where her…