On the set of 1946’s Duel in the Sun, King Vidor was constantly assailed by a positively megalomaniacal David O. Selznick, who extrapolated new subplots and mini-climaxes from the already lurid western scenario, as well as imposed multiple other directors’ visions on Vidor’s so as to center and…
Marry Me isn’t even worth a second date. New romantic comedy Marry Me marks a reunion for stars Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson, both of whom appeared in 1997’s Anaconda. Indeed, Anaconda may stay in viewers minds while watching Marry Me, as the prospect of a giant CGI snake…
I Want You Back is a pleasantly askew rom-com, acidic on the edges and reveling in the distinct comedic style of its leads. There was a time when a mid-budget romantic comedy like I Want You Back would star the likes of Anne Hathaway and Paul Rudd, open in…
The Other Me amounts to little more than an empty spectacle banking on David Lynch’s name. Let’s get it out of the way: the most interesting thing about Giga Agladze’s The Other Me is its credited executive producer. David Lynch’s name is all over the film’s press materials and…
Erudite and playful and moving, The Worst Person in the World is brimming with ideas and feeling, and executed with the touch of a master storyteller. First published in 1967, Joan Didion’s essay Goodbye to All That details her arrival to, and eventual departure from, New York City, where she would spend…
Black Medusa is cast with a certain austere beauty, but is an otherwise empty exercise in bland, utilitarian form. In a thankless role as one of the most morose femmes fatales in memory, Nour Hajri plays Nada, a (mostly) mute office worker by day, serial killer (men only, natch)…
Happening Early on in Audrey Diwan’s Golden Lion–winning feature, Happening, a young woman is singled out in a classroom, unable to answer her professor’s query about a poem. Through a group of classmates, we learn that she is set to leave school to get married, though their gossip…
Compartment No. 6 is a gentle, moving romance that understands the benefit of languor rather than compression in establishing human connection. Single lodgings in a two-seater train compartment only afford so much privacy, and so in Compartment No. 6 Ljoha (Yuriy Borisov) and Laura (Seidi Haarla) confront each other…
Sharp Stick Though she’s been away from the film festival circuit for 11 years at this point, there’s no doubt that the career path Lena Dunham charted — from SXSW film premiere to HBO series deal in less than a year — inadvertently set off a dramatic reconsideration…
Rifkin’s Festival isn’t necessarily major Allen, but it’s a light romp that exists at a fascinating nexus of the director’s career-long pursuits and predilections. There’s a saying that goes something like, no matter how many times you’ve told a joke, if it’s genuinely funny and you know how to…
“This boy… and this girl… were never properly introduced to the world we live in.” So begins the dramatic voice-over of Nicholas Ray’s debut feature, They Live By Night (1948). It’s an apt motto for virtually all of Ray’s oeuvre, one filled to the brim with neurotic romantics…
“A little more passion, though, would have been appreciated.” So says Dave Kehr of American — by way of London by way of France — director Joseph Losey’s Mr. Klein, his 1976 film of Nazi ascendency and distorted identities. Losey liked images that were cool to the touch,…
Brazen is slickly made, but it’s otherwise firmly rooted in ’80s Lifetime thriller territory. As a title, Brazen sounds a little old-fashioned, a promise of titillation by way of the Hays Code. It makes sense, then, that new Netflix thriller Brazen comes from the pen of famed romance novelist…
The Whaler Boy undermines any potential for naturalism and rawness with slick artifice and discordant commercial style. Philipp Yuryev’s debut feature The Whaler Boy takes us to the far reaches of the Chukotka Peninsula, the northeastern edge of Russia’s territory, with only fifty-five miles of Bering Strait separating it…
#1. “Man, tell them haters open up the jail (Open up the jail) And you can tell my baby mamas, “Get the bail money” (Bail me) I said one thing they ain’t like, threw me out like they ain’t care for me Threw me out like I’m garbage,…
#7. Arriving at the tail end of 2020 — Christmas Day, to be exact — to the bewilderment of fans and skeptics alike, Playboi Carti’s Whole Lotta Red was finally delivered to the world after months of hyper-speculation and a slew of false starts (including an appropriately named mid-tier…
#14. Duo Magdalena Bay make pop music that is in love with being pop music. Although their songs burst with playfulness and a desire to center the unexpected, the overwhelming impression their tracks leave you with is one of care — care to polish their songs until they…
#16. 2021 saw Club Harlecore open its doors to the Internet, a 24-hour web-based rave spot featuring a quartet of mystical DJs brought into our reality by maximalist pop producer Danny L. Harle to coincide with the release of his first full-length album, Harlecore. Surprising as it may be,…
Honorable Mention: Licorice Pizza is, like almost every other Paul Thomas Anderson movie, about America. More specifically it is about America as embodied in the Los Angeles area of California in the 1970s, just as Inherent Vice and Boogie Nights were before it. There Will Be Blood is…
Honorable Mention: After the WWII-set Phoenix (a production so emotionally taxing it seems to have severed the relationship between the director and his long-time collaborator Nina Hoss) and the historical dystopian Transit, which manipulated temporal signifiers to portray the fascism of the past encroaching upon and swallowing up…
#24. Siberia flaunts Abel Ferrara’s enthralling and fearless devotion to a uniquely dynamic (and specifically filmic) form of psychological expressionism — an approach that is still at least modestly grounded in supplying bread-crumb details of narrative, which here means a focus on the spiraling soul of Clint (Willem Dafoe)…