Comedies don’t get more uproarious than This Is Spinal Tap. The 1984 rockumentary has transcended its modest origins and settled into cinematic Hall of Fame…
Director David Mackenzie has had a fascinating career; in the past, we’d likely consider him a talented journeyman, the sort of solid professional who can…
In Fire Island, director Andrew Ahn and writer/actor Joel Kim Booster retrofitted Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, not just as a means to reflect the…
Sigrid Nunez’s 2018 novel The Friend was a critical success — winning that year’s National Book Award for Fiction — that also managed to find…
If simplicity forms the premise of Andrew and Sam Zuchero’s Love Me, subtlety, however, is the last thing to constitute its payoff. Taking a gamut…
Six years ago, Mike Leigh produced his first war film, Peterloo, in which domestic unrest in 1819 led British troops to slaughter protesting civilians. At…
Since his out-of-nowhere debut feature Tales from the Gimli Hospital in 1988, Winnipeg-based director Guy Maddin has become synonymous with a very particular brand of…
On the heels of this past spring’s I.S.S., the summer season brings us another lower-budget, space-bound indie thriller, Slingshot, starring Casey Affleck in what’s basically…
What would Andrew Tate or the late Theodore J. Kaczynski make of Sasquatch Sunset? The litmus tests of this cinematic curio, which is more or…
The Holocaust has been mined for kitschy platitudes for a long time now. It seems that artists, against their best instincts, just aren’t able to…
There’s no dearth of movies about prehistoric man; stories of the earliest days of (pre)civilization span the campy histrionics of something like 10,000 BC to the more…
It’s not often you get to see a space-based thriller that doesn’t come with a massive VFX budget and a huge marketing push. Delivering viewers…
Meg Ryan is arguably nothing less than one of the all-time great romantic leading ladies, having earned the accolades with a trio of the defining…
A trio of octogenarians have a close encounter of the third kind in Jules, director Marc Turtletaub’s high-concept dramedy that is, strangely enough, not the…
Two parts simmering battle of wills between a pair of strong-willed authors, one part bone-dry autocritique of its own exquisite corpse-like premise, Alice Troughton’s The…
Writer-director Laurel Parmet’s The Starling Girl opens with 17-year-old Jem Starling (Eliza Scanlen) dancing with her church’s worship troupe. It’s clear that dancing brings Jem…
High-concept comedy Mafia Mamma comes courtesy of Catherine Hardwicke, a director who never met a potentially interesting premise she couldn’t sabotage with her bland visual…
If one thing can be said for the award-winning, box office-safe, well-worn road of the biopic, it’s that with the volume of films being made,…
2nd Chance operates in the same unappealing blunt-force register as Bahrani’s narrative works. Ramin Bahrani, once again, has something to say about the state of the…
Breaking certainly tells a necessary story, but it largely boils itself down to basic action theatrics and undermines any noble intent. Breaking, the feature directorial…
Summering is a clichéd and ludicrous attempt at the coming-of-age tale, both thematically and tonally inept. It’s been nearly a decade since writer-director James Ponsoldt…