Llosa does her best to capture the delirium of the source material, but Fever Dream can’t quite sustain its dizzying, eerie tenor. Claudia Llosa’s Fever Dream is a film that certainly seeks to live up to its title, building from its eerie source material an delirious,…
The Estate succeeds in delivering cult-ready laughs, but feels entirely superficial and neutered as satire. A designer-rags to even-more-riches fable from director James Kapner and writer/leading man Chris Baker, The Estate follows George (Baker) and Lux (Eliza Coupe), the son and trophy wife of an…
Endless Night is a film of well-meaning political engagement that succeeds only at conveying the intentionality of its aims. Endless Night falls into a recent spate of art cinema that foreground its political engagement at the expense of both aesthetics (usually patchwork, derivative) and narrative…
Obayashi’s final film is an apporpriately madcap, delirious submersion into the very heart of cinema, and is an articulation of its power in a despairing world. Nobuhiko Obayashi, who passed away earlier this year, on April 10, was until recently relegated to the periphery…
At the Ready engaged necessary discourse, but unfortunately leaves its most fertile sites for interrogation unexplored. In light of the surging unpopularity of its subject matter, Maisie Crow’s sophomore documentary may come across as contentious and provocative in certain respects. Under the Trump administration, part…
Villeneuve’s Dune is a gorgeous, monumental, and thrilling take on Herbert’s material, only slightly hampered by a weak finale that anticipates an intended Part Two. It’s the year 10,191. Interstellar space travel (and therefore the known universe) is dependent on a substance called Spice, which can…
Night Teeth is a generic, derivative DTV trifle that fails to make its vampire story vampy enough. Onto the heap of DTV detritus you can now toss Night Teeth, a wildly generic, timidly un-exciting modern-day vampires-in-LA jalopy that’s just completely undistinguished, right down to it’s…
The French Dispatch is the latest Wes Anderson film to be utterly encumbered by the director’s propeller-beanie twee and flattened storytelling chops. For better or for worse, there are few working American auteurs whose visual stamps are as broadly and immediately recognizable as Wes Anderson.…
Louis Wain has one distinctly lovely stretch, but it’s shrouded in pervasive busyness and zaniness that ultimately sinks the whole enterprise. Will Sharpe’s The Electrical Life of Louis Wain opens with Benedict Cumberbatch, heavily pancaked in old-age make-up, manically dancing in a way that immediately recalls Grandpa…
Lucky Chan-sil is a delicate, deeply humanist film superbly anchored by Kang’s lead performance. “If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life,” the saying goes. Tell that to Lee Chan-sil, the protagonist of Kim Cho-hee’s debut film, Lucky Chan-Sil.…
