At the crossroads of about a half-dozen genres and borrowing the best that each has to offer, there’s no other movie quite like Ridley Scott’s Thelma & Louise. It’s remarkable that a Brit previously known for atmospheric slow-burns like Alien and Blade Runner helmed…
Valley Girl doesn’t live up to its namesake, but Jessica Rothe continues to engender good will. From the film’s earliest moments, as Alicia Silverstone appears as a forty-ish mother recounting her adventurous teenage years via amiable maternal chit-chat with her distraught daughter, Ruby (Camila…
**What follows is the inaugural KtC entry for the recently added 1950s canon. Make sure to check out all of the 1950s inclusions (and the rest of the canon in its current entirety). Minnelli’s melodramas, always receding behind his much more popular musicals and…
Whereas 2015’s Creed transcends its station as essentially the seventh Rocky due in large part to director Ryan Coogler’s reliance on his actors’ emotional intelligence, and his ability to balance character nuance and broad narrative strokes, Creed II resembles not much more than a generic Rocky sequel. Coogler’s out, and new director Steven Caple Jr. abandons the complex…
David Fincher’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo was less about the mystery of a serial killer picking off women, more about investigating its lead character, Lisbeth Salander. Nearly a complete enigma, Salander nevertheless served as a nodal point for Fincher’s obsession with digital/analog contrasts and his penchant for…
John Ford’s late career was dotted with heavily revisionist takes on the western cinematic mythology he helped to define, whether attacks on the genre’s racism or even its legacy as a romanticized outpost of uncivilized abandon. Ford’s final film, 7 Women, gave these critiques their purest…
