Troubled families rarely dissolve overnight. Instead, a slow erosive process corrodes pacts and compromises over weeks, months, and even years. Inevitably, each member becomes trapped…
Will Ferrell is a very funny guy who has been accused of doing a certain type, a type he falls into easily, too often. I…
Self-seriousness can mortally wound the work of a pulp filmmaker who depends on his flashy style. In the case of British director Neil Marshall, obvious…
“One man’s meat is another man’s poison.” Those words have never rung so true as they do in conjunction with Alexandre Aja’s headfirst dive into…
It’s a commonly held misconception that the exploitation cinema of the 1970s and early ’80s was “cheesy,” constituting unintentionally funny, poorly made trash notable only…
Forget Monty Python — ten years ago, some friends and I stumbled across a British SNL-type television series called Jam, a mixed bag of some…
Turkish director Fatih Akin’s movies are often musical in nature, fitting their rhythms to rhythm and their tones to tune. If Head-On, his first real…
Although the story of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s L’Enfer began over 45 years ago, the short history of this documentary was launched in a Paris elevator, where…
Though made in 2010, Sylvester Stallone’s The Expendables has more in common with action pictures of days gone by. That’s not to say that the…
Female cinematic incarnations have long played second fiddle to subjective male visions of lust, intoxication, and regret, collectively narrow interpretations that often disavow a woman’s…
Edgar Wright is a man at home in pop culture. Despite a winking self-awareness of the tropes that drive their genres, his first two feature…
Late in Alex Gibney’s Casino Jack and the United States of Money, a damning but top-heavy indictment of clearly evil Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff, we’re…