The 1987 release of La Bamba, Luis Valdez’s biopic detailing the life of Chicano musician Ritchie Valens, set a cinematic benchmark. On its face, La…
Christopher Nolan is the movies now. For good or ill, he has been anointed as the ultimate modern filmmaker, a Spielbergian master pushing the medium…
Since the dawn of cinema, the Western has conjured up an abundance of memorable, grizzled outlaws, often out to rob a bank or a train…
Credit where it’s due: Evil Dead Burn, the sixth movie in the franchise and third with a director other than Sam Raimi, offers a clever…
In a world completely in thrall to corporate IP and mega-budget computerized imperialist fantasies, we should be eternally grateful to festivals like Fantasia for platforming…
Sympathetic portrayals of kids who’ve fallen into a life of crime have been commonplace in the arthouse circuit since at least the days of Italian…
Writer-director Georgia Bernstein’s feature debut, Night Nurse, appears to fit within a poetic label once afforded to Claire Denis: this erotic thriller bears a sense…
William Kaufman makes movies like someone who saw the centerpiece bank shootout in Michael Mann’s Heat and internalized every beat of it, determined to bring new heights…
Aside from the late Jonas Mekas, Boston-based director Ross McElwee is probably the best-known practitioner of the diary film. For nearly 50 years, McElwee has…
Spilling over with indeterminate parody-cum-reenactments of ’20s, ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s motion picture nostalgia, this first real effort in galvanizing the slapstick potential of the…
One of the hardest things to pull off in comedy is having characters who are knowingly foolish without also dragging the film around them into…
Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World, an entry in the PBS series American Masters directed by Sasha Waters (Gary Winogrand: All Things…
Young Washington, distributed by Angel Studios as part of a slate conspicuously timed for America’s 250th — including the forthcoming Revolutionary War flick Drummer Boy…