Land works best as a swooning mood piece, but lacks in thematic complexity and is too familiar by half. In Land — one of the two high profile films at Sundance 2021 directed by popular actresses making their debuts behind the camera, the other being…
Promising Young Woman does its best to reshape the rape-revenge narrative into a novel form, but it ultimately fails to muster much ambiguity or thorniness. Heavy with all sorts of baggage though it may be, the exploitation subcategory known as rape-revenge is a little-loved, oft-misunderstood…
Kajillionaire is both July’s most restrained and most maudlin work to date There’s no denying that Miranda July’s particular idiosyncrasy shares DNA with a number of forgettable, mid-aughts indie comedies, but her weirdo shtick, then and now, is too outré to be regarded as stereotypical…
To understand the ostensible intent of Jon Stewart’s latest film, Irresistible, it’s best to begin at the end: “Money lived happily ever after…reveling in its outsized influence over American politics,” a postscript reads. This is a uniquely unifying idea in contemporary America, one that…
Ever since Eve’s Bayou, Kasi Lemmons has foregrounded the need for black adolescents to realize the importance of their influence and existence in a society fundamentally unjust to them. This specific thematic concern may situate her as uniquely qualified to tell the story of African American…
One of cinema’s most creatively fruitful collaborations is that of director Todd Haynes and cinematographer Ed Lachman. The films they’ve made together can superficially be described as period pieces, but this term inexactly and inadequately describes the emotional, psychological, and intellectual resonances these like-minded…
Jim Jarmusch’s new horror-comedy, The Dead Don’t Die, is a missive from the other side. For one thing, it’s a zombie film in the tradition of the late George A. Romero, complete with the genre iconography that entails. For another, it’s set in the…
Iranian writer/director Asghar Farhadi understands the nature of secrets and their revelations, that they rarely signal resolution and instead work to further complicate situations. Whenever one of his characters confesses to some long-standing deception or discloses a crushing truth, the weight of this disclosure…
We’re a long ways away from when directors like Allan Dwan and Joseph H. Lewis could pack an absurd amount of plot into 70-minute features; even rom-coms and straight-to-dvd action flicks today clock in at over two hours (to say nothing of the glut of…
The year’s second major film addressing the particular evil of church-sanctioned gay conversion therapy, Boy Erased (based on a memoir of the same name) was never going to be subtle. But where Sundance hit The Miseducation of Cameron Post sought to present a measured,…
