Ol Parker is no stranger to a feel-good star vehicle. He wrote The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and its sequel, and directed Mamma Mia! Here…
Chivalry is very much not dead in the modern world: just look at the title of Thea Sharrock’s latest, and be impressed by the double…
Acquired by HBO and released just in time for Emmy consideration, writer-director Jim Rash’s new film Miss You, Love You is a dialogue-driven two-hander that…
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: after witnessing the senseless slaughter of her parents, a young woman barely escapes with her life and…
As someone whose first airplane experience was a slightly traumatic flight from Amsterdam to Minneapolis not long after 9/11, it was a perplexing experience to…
Canadian animator Félix Dufour-Laperrière has described his third and most ambitious feature, film Death Does Not Exist, as a tonal experiment, dropping characters possessed with…
From a certain point of view, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan: Ghost War is emblematic of the state of modern filmmaking. For one thing, a resurgence…
Jérôme Reybaud’s concise, lacerating film A Balcony in Limoges appears at first to be an odd-couple comedy, albeit with unresolved psychological trouble churning under the…
The current acclaim for Canadian cinema is, like many attempts to promote a new wave, a snapshot of a rising generation that aside from nationality…
Critic Filipe Furtado recently wrote a piece extolling the virtues of low-budget genre filmmaking, emphasizing how certain action specialists tend to compensate for a lack…
What a strange thing, the Olympics. In 1896, with the tools for globalization just barely on the horizon, the world (or, rather, Greece, leveraging its…
If Peter Farrelly acquired any auteurist pretensions after undeservedly winning the Oscar for Best Picture with his insincere race-relations road movie Green Book (2018), he…
“What are the stats on shark movies? Still just the one good one?” That’s a direct quote from perennial funnyman Paul F. Tompkins, made during…
In the new Apple TV original film Outcome, Keanu Reeves stars as Reef Hawk, a hugely successful actor emerging from a five-year hiatus that found…
It might be a little premature to have the “late style” conversation with regard to the highly prolific Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who turns 69 in July.…
The time travel mob comedy Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice opens with the actor Ben Schwartz singing a foul-mouthed rendition of the Billy…
Jessie Buckley’s hesitant recitation of Bonedog — the achingly painful poem written by Eva H.D. — is one of the most memorably harrowing sequences in…
Sometimes you can tell right away that you’re in for a thoroughly generic bit of junk food, but that’s not always instructive of quality. Often,…
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…
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,…
A severely schematic crime thriller that paints a rather stereotypical picture of the Brazilian underworld but is chiefly about how many long, unbroken, and overhead…