The Last Word from Your Editor, Sam C. Mac: With the 2010s officially over, the time seems right for another departure: after 12 years (with a small break in the middle), I’m stepping down as this site’s Editor-in-Chief, to be succeeded by co-founder (and unapologetic Iron & Wine-lover) Luke…
The Last Word from Your Editor, Sam C. Mac: With the 2010s officially over, the time seems right for another departure: after 12 years (with a small break in the middle), I’m stepping down as this site’s Editor-in-Chief, to be succeeded by co-founder (and unapologetic Iron & Wine-lover) Luke…
The shallow characterizations at the core of Les Misérables dampen the effect of its incendiary anger. Ladj Ly’s debut feature may be called Les Misérables, but it’s not an adaptation of either the Victor Hugo novel or the Broadway musical. Rather, it’s a tense cop drama, simultaneously engaging…
Weathering with You is a heartwarming and delicately animated escapist fantasy finds hope in hardscrabble realities. Makoto Shinkai has already proved himself an idiosyncratic anime filmmaker whose singular universe is gradually shaped and expanded through each new work, his stories largely revolving around teenage couples and their coming of…
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 into some DVD bargain bin assuming that those still exist by the time this sentence finishes. In other words, while the title of In Review Online’s new monthly feature devoted…
Over a decade before the Coen Brothers released their neo-noir, blood-soaked vision of Americana, Blood Simple, Terrence Malick’s Badlands etched into the public consciousness a particularly languid flavor of Midwestern cruelty. Loosely based on the true story of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate’s 1958 killing spree, Badlands…
2019 was another faithful year that reminded us that there’s no hope whatsoever for anything: Our political system continues to fail us in a remarkable number of ways, cultural institutions continue to decay from lack of funding and relevancy, and the nearly-decade long rise of continued support for…
It’s been a year of confrontation at the movies, as the domestic and international conflicts of the past several years have reached varying degrees of terminus, seemingly (but just as likely not). Battles in the world between tradition and (r)evolution, in all the myriad forms that those themes…
From its title alone, Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life concerns itself with subjects that cinema often struggles to depict: the twin blossomings of consciousness and conscience. In telling the story of Franz Jägerstätter (August Diehl), an Austrian farmer and conscientious objector during the time of the Third Reich, the notoriously…
The instantly ravishing Portrait of a Lady on Fire is Céline Sciamma’s grandest film to date, even if its story feels somewhat familiar. Winner of the Queer Palm at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, it is the latest in the French filmmaker’s oeuvre to observe young women at their most curious…
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 into some DVD bargain bin assuming that those still exist by the time this sentence finishes. In other words, while the title of In Review Online’s new monthly feature devoted…
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 into some DVD bargain bin assuming that those still exist by the time this sentence finishes. In other words, while the title of In Review Online’s new monthly feature devoted…
Light From Light is being billed as a paranormal ghost story, and while that description certainly isn’t untrue, it presents a conception far different from what writer-director Paul Harrill has in store. More than ghosts, the characters here are haunted by grief, questioning if the hardships endured throughout…
Though he didn’t invent it, James Mangold so perfected the Hollywood biopic/true story template with Walk the Line that they made a beat-for-beat parody of it in Walk Hard, so he might as well have. In Ford v Ferrari, he aims that factory efficiency at the hyper-masculine sports…
The Irishman tells the probably-not-entirely-true story of Robert DeNiro’s Frank Sheeran, using cutting-edge visual effects technology to place him inside some of the most important events in American history, right next to a lot of famous people, many of whom wind up dead. It’s almost like Martin Scorsese’s…
Universal’s marketing department has been working overtime to sell the new romantic comedy Last Christmas as some sort of spiritual cousin to what is now apparently considered a modern-day holiday classic: Love, Actually. Remember Emma Thompson, who appeared in just one of that film’s myriad storylines? Well, she co-wrote…
It’s nigh-impossible to discuss the new film In My Room, from Berlin School-affiliated writer/director Ulrich Köhler, without revealing that a third of the way in, seemingly all of humanity vanishes overnight, save schlubby protagonist Armin (Hans Löw). Until that jolt, Köhler’s film is a muted, semi-drab character study following…
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 into some DVD bargain bin assuming that those still exist by the time this sentence finishes. In other words, while the title of In Review Online’s new monthly feature devoted…
For the past 55 years, Michael Apted has embarked on a project that is both a landmark documentary film series and the ultimate reality TV program. Since 1964, Apted has followed the lives of a group of 14 representative British citizens from varied backgrounds, starting from the age…
Our third and final dispatch from the 2019 New York Film Festival is offers a smaller pool of takes but checks off one of the year’s biggest players — Josh and Benny Safdie’s Uncut Gems. Also featured here are thoughts on Olivier Assayas’s latest, Wasp Network, the ninth…
Our second dispatch from the 2019 BFI London Film Festival is heavy on likely awards season contenders — Jojo Rabbit, Ford v Ferrari, and The Two Popes — while also offering takes on a trio of international festival regulars this year: Hlynur Pálmason’s A White, White Day, Helina Reijn’s Instinct, and Levin…