It’s widely understood that most action movies have a somewhat reactionary bent to them — shoot first and ask questions later is both the…
Tseng Ying-Ting’s crime drama The Abandoned announces itself with New Year’s Eve fireworks, a pretty little ditty in the form of Yazoo’s “Only You,”…
The entire notion of turning The Color Purple into a musical has always felt a little unseemly. Based on Alice Walker’s Pulitzer-winning novel, the…
Someday, now that it’s all over, someone’s going to write a big fat tell-all about just what exactly happened to the DCEU, a project…
Dashing Through the Snow It seems wholly appropriate that Disney’s new holiday comedy Dashing Through the Snow bypassed theaters completely and premiered on the…
A pervasive distrust has infiltrated a German middle school in Ilker Çatak’s The Teachers’ Lounge, roiling both the students and the faculty. Insinuations fly freely, along…
Michel Franco is a director who approaches unadorned tragedy with great familiarity; not as a shock or an inconvenience, but as the organizing principle…
Once a discarded pitch for a Star War, now even before it’s released an already-truncated first half of an eventually-six-hour techno-fantasy epic, Zack Snyder’s…
Space and time are rendered deliberately unstable in Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers. The film is anchored in a new, near-empty London high-rise…
In the pantheon of late-19th to early-20th century intellectuals, there are few with such starkly opposing views as Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis. At…
A major fear factor in horror stems from isolation, and its pervasive influence extends to both claustrophobic and agoraphobic conditions. Whether confined within a…
More than almost any other director, the methods of Michael Mann’s filmmaking have always matched its meanings, and his characters are defined by their…
The latest piece of cotton candy in the ever-prolific François Ozon’s filmography, The Crime is Mine (Mon Crime) finds him restaging a 1934 play…
In October of 1972, a chartered airplane carrying four dozen people including a Uruguayan rugby team and their friends and families crashed in the Andes. Those who weren’t killed upon impact or…
Discussing Sean Durkin’s The Iron Claw, a dramatization of the lives of the Von Erich clan whose importance to professional wrestling has stretched across decades and multiple generations, in any…
We live in cynical, hyperconnected times, and one remedy we rely on our cultural products to deliver now and again is genuine, unabashed sincerity.…
There’s a pretty standard axiom about “knowing your audience” when it comes to writing; or in this case, documenting a renowned filmmaker. Cyril Leuthy’s…
The latest Vietnamese box office sensation from Victor Vu, one of the country’s most prolific directors, The Last Wife teases the gaping hole for…