Blue Bayou‘s reach for authenticity is entirely undermined by its empty, saccharine sheen of melodrama. In its broad strokes, writer-director Justin Chon’s Blue Bayou seeks to shed light on a specific miscarriage of justice that has seen thousands of children who were adopted from…
The Card Counter takes a similar shape to many of Schrader’s Lonely Man films, but this latest can’t quite overcome the template and thrive on its own merits. Oscar Isaac is William Tell (a self-applied pseudonym), former soldier, and ex-con. He patrols the country…
Stillwater tiptoes around complex, potentially rich discourse without ever committing to any real ideological principle. Who is Tom McCarthy, really? Once a semi-successful TV actor, he’s now a director/writer with an Oscar (for his tasteless, screenwriterly Spotlight script) and a “one for me, one for…
Roadrunner doesn’t revolutionize the portrait documentary, but it does execute its essential elements with pathos and formal precision. The late culinary connoisseur Anthony Bourdain once said “the greatest sin is mediocrity.” Regardless of the original context, this statement can be applied to a number…
The Sparks Brothers is an energetic, cinematic homage to one of the most cinematic musical groups of all-time. For most of their fans and listeners, a first encounter with Sparks did not result in the assumption that the duo of Ron and Russell Mael were…
Final Account is not just a reckoning with history, but with its present lingering, executed with uncompromising force and first-hand immediacy. Released after the death of director Luke Holland, Final Account serves as a culmination of a decade’s worth of accounts of the Final Solution…
Profile’s subject matter is more than a little silly, but its thrilling Screenlife tinkering speaks to the form’s malleability and still-untapped potential. 2021 really might be Timur Bekmambetov’s year, an achievement the director/producer has been slowly building toward ever since the game-changing release of…
Sharrock’s middlebrow approach and sitcom-ready style undermines much of Limbo‘s potential power. About a decade ago, Serge Daney’s then recently-translated essay “The Tracking Shot in Kapo” began making the rounds in cinephile circles. Like most dense, complicated film writing, many of its finer points…
Author/chef/attorney/entrepreneur Eddie Huang adds a few more bullets to his CV as writer and director of coming-of-age drama Boogie, the tale of a Chinese-American high school basketball prodigy torn between the unrealistic expectations of his domineering parents and a desire to follow a path…
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…
