The Vigil isn’t without its minor grievances, but its willingness to navigate new horror territory is most welcome. Since the birth of the horror genre, especially its occult and supernatural sub-genres, Christianity has had the market fairly cornered. Rife with ubiquitous symbolism and substantial lore…
Blithe Spirit‘s attempts at screwball comedy land with a dull, well-costumed thud. Mounting another film adaptation of Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit isn’t a heretical act; the work itself was always considered minor Coward, and the 1945 film version was met with moderate fanfare and…
Little Fish is a pointless exercise in bleakness that boasts neither interesting characters nor much visual character. Chad Hartigan’s Little Fish dares to answer a question that not a single soul on the planet has ever asked or even pondered: What if Michael Haneke’s Amour…
The timely and harrowing MLK/FBI explores a particular American history that isn’t so safely in the past. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is now a near-universally revered and beloved historical icon, but as Sam Pollard’s meticulous and quietly infuriating documentary MLK/FBI shows,…
Dear Santa succeeds in encouraging an emotional response, but does in the most manipulative of fashions. Documentary filmmaker Dana Nachman strikes again. Her latest effort, Dear Santa, is a film that, much like past efforts Batkid Begins and Pick of the Litter, seems to exist…
Farewell Amor resembles, in shape, less accomplished recent indie efforts, but it eschews much of their patness in creating something altogether more complex and affecting. From a cursory glance, one could be forgiven for dismissing Ekwa Msangi’s feature debut, Farewell Amor, as yet another recrudescent…
Shithouse marks a promising debut from writer-director Cooper Raiff, effectively capturing the awkwardness and insecurity of the collegiate experience. One’s reaction to the coming-of-age dramedy Shithouse will likely depend on how one relates to its central protagonist, Alex (writer-director Cooper Raiff), a white, middle-class,…
Laura Gabbert has a knack for pairing gastronomy and film — as in her 2016 documentary, City of Gold, which profiles Jonathan Gold, the first food critic to win a Pulitzer Prize. Gabbert’s latest, Ottolenghi and the Cakes of Versailles, follows renowned Israeli chef…
The Nest is a deeply obvious, under-cooked attempt at horror-flecked domestic portraiture. The Nest, writer-director Sean Durkin’s long-awaited follow-up to his remarkably assured debut feature, 2011’s Martha Marcy May Marlene, utilizes the genre trappings of horror to present the portrait of a marriage on the…
Almereyda’s Experimenter-style mode is not as organic of a fit for the often compelling but ultimately overburdened Tesla. Having risen to renewed prominence on the indie circuit with 2015’s fourth wall-defying biopic Experimenter and 2017’s sci-fi drama of memory and quasi-dystopia Marjorie Prime, Michael Almereyda…
