The Vast of Night opens with an assured and prefatory walk-and-talk, an extended tracking shot that first follows first Everett (Jake Horowitz), a local radio show host, and then adds Fay (Sierra McCormick), a student and switchboard operator — both young residents of 1950s Cayuga,…
On September 27, 2014, the CW Network cut animation out of their Saturday morning bloc. They were the last network to do so. It was replaced with live-action family-friendly series, mirroring a general trend away from expensive, skilled labor needed for cartoons and toward…
Playing out with an advocacy doc’s briskness and efficiency of exposition rather than a suspenseful chronicle of investigative journalism, Scott Z. Burns’ The Report is closer to something like Spotlight than the more formally aggressive and elegant All the President’s Men or Zodiac. And…
There’s nothing particularly new in Joe Penna’s survival drama Arctic. But the director’s gritty, hard-edged vision of human resilience strikes a primal chord that other similarly themed films do not. For a movie that’s essentially Cast Away by way of The Revenant, Arctic eschews…
It’s unclear whether The Haunting of Sharon Tate exists as an outgrowth of the ongoing pop culture fascination with Charles Manson and the Manson murders of ’69, or as a quickie, Asylum-esque cash grab meant to beat Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in…
Given Mindy Kaling’s standing as a woman of color with an established career in television — as an actress and a producer/creator — one might think that Late Night would be a slam dunk. Working from her own screenplay, Kaling plays Molly, a young,…
Knife + Heart was probably the oddest entry in Cannes’s main competition slate last year — a trendy, queer, pop cinema throwback that stood-out in a sea of stodginess from the usual festival circuit faves. Director Yann Gonzalez previously caught the attention of world cinema’s…
“You know, I grew up around black people my whole life. I mean, if the truth be told, I probably know n***** better than you. And don’t go getting offended by my use of the quote-unquote N-word. I have a black wife and two…
The Professor and the Madman arrives with an awful lot of baggage for such a modest, unassuming movie. As detailed by Nick Shager in a Daily Beast article, the film has been sitting on a shelf while Mel Gibson (whose company Icon Productions bought…
Billed as “the first Indian film to be shot inside a single room,” Dhayam proves that some ideas are so inane that just maybe they aren’t enough to sustain a film. (In any case, there are multiple shots used throughout Dhayam involving the cast…
