Happiest Season is trite, platitude-heavy Christmas offering that fails on nearly every front. Five years ago, when Todd Haynes’ Carol hit theaters, a moment was marked in which the worlds of queer cinema and the Christmas film were twined. In fairness, Carol wasn’t exactly a mainstream flick wholly…
Run could have been a bit of delightful trash but is instead a disaster of mismanaged tone. Let’s be very clear about one thing, just so there’s no confusion going forward: Run, the new thriller from the team behind 2018’s technology-driven Searching — writer-director…
Books of Blood is a little exploitative, quite a bit derivative, and overwhelmingly boring. There’s nary an original image or idea in Brannon Braga’s Books of Blood, but not simply because it’s an adaptation. Like most interpretations of Clive Barker’s work, this one plays fast…
Ever since H.G. Wells unleashed The Time Machine upon the world in 1895, artists have used the conceit to impart important life lessons, waxing broadly on everything from mortality to regret to the meaning of existence. Wells was the first to offer a science-based…
Describing Sofia Behrs Tolstaya, a diarist and photographer who remains better known as the wife of Leo Tolstoy, Elizabeth Hardwick wrote: “With her mangled intelligence, her operatic, intolerable frenzies of distress, she comes forth still with an almost menacing aliveness, saying it all like…
The instantly ravishing Portrait of a Lady on Fire is Céline Sciamma’s grandest film to date, even if its story feels somewhat familiar. Winner of the Queer Palm at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, it is the latest in the French filmmaker’s oeuvre to observe young women…
The Satanists in Hail Satan? don’t actually worship the devil, but it’d be a lot cooler if they did. Instead of ritualistic blood sacrifices and black magick, the Satanic Temple has set its sights on doing political and social good. When a statue of the Ten…
While Paul W. S. Anderson’s Resident Evil films continued to grow a stronger and stronger reputation among the most vulgar of auterists, another series — of Japanese animations, following the plot of the original Capcom video games — began to see release, providing a role of…
Let the Sunshine In is an exquisite romantic comedy in part because its laughs are sad and its sadness is funny. Claire Denis isn’t a filmmaker to let the complexity of the human emotions she either captures physically, or insinuates psychologically, settle into easy…
Minding the Gap begins by opaquely tracing the lives of three skateboarding high schoolers — including the film’s director, Bing Liu — in their economically diminished hometown. Liu staves off any threat of tedium in this opening section by forgoing typical onscreen skateboarding action…
