The Bluff isn’t the same kind of pirate film as Pirates of the Caribbean. Unlike the leviathan Disney franchise, The Bluff has very little seafaring,…
Allow this writer to save you some time: Baz Luhrmann’s EPiC, a concert film made in the wake of the eponymous director’s newfound (and lucrative)…
Content warning: this piece mentions Imperial Japan’s sexual violence. In Yasuzo Masumura’s Black Test Car (1962), the director revisits ideas from his earlier Giants and…
Bebe Go’s 11 starts with a concession: “in february 2020, i received a grant to make a feature film,” reads its lime-green title cards. “the…
One day there will be a knock on the door and it’ll be me. …
Occasionally something enters the streaming/DTV action space that genuinely merits curiosity, even when the project doesn’t quite live up to its potential. Marking a perfect…
Beware the multi-hyphenate. Though there are plenty of examples of cross-disciplinary artists who are successful in more than one realm, it’s worth treating the feature…
In those chilly days of the Romantic poet, Samuel Coleridge sought to distinguish two synonyms. What is imagination, and what is fancy? He had this…
Isaac Florentine is still considered one of the old-school best of the DTV action directors. He’s credited with helping to popularize the format with his…
A surprisingly faithful retelling of the Ealing Studios comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets (although one has to dig around in the film’s credits to confirm…
The final act of Matt Johnson’s 2023 comedy Blackberry — one of the best films of its year, and this half decade — opens with…
“Look at its body,” Melanie Griffith commands with a bawdy dip in vocal tone. The ‘80s icon, star of capitalist fable Working Girl and voyeuristic…
In Kevin and Matthew McManus’ Redux Redux, Irene Kelly (Michaela McManus) vaults through an endless sequence of parallel realities, searching for a universe where her…
“Amanda Kramer Body Swap Movie” is a description that, if you’re familiar with her work, should get that brain firing with possibility. At the very…
Where is the line between genuine love and selfish devotion? That’s the question bubbling at the center of Dusty Mancinelli and Madeleine Sims-Fewer’s sophomore feature,…
It’s been a while since we last saw Gore Verbinski. Definitely an idiosyncratic stylist, he found himself a real niche in the early 2000s with…
Luis Buñuel didn’t think much of the Joseph Kessel novel that was the source material for his 1967 adaptation of Belle de Jour and mostly…
In “Wuthering Heights” — as Emerald Fennell sees it — death and ecstasy rest on the head of the same pin. Its opening credits are…
The title of Bart Layton’s Crime 101 is a play on the film’s plot primarily transpiring on and around the 101 Freeway — a major interstate highway…
Filmmaking duo Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli took the 2020 TIFF Midnight Madness crowd by storm with their stunning debut feature Violation, an extremely dark,…
In 2021, a residential area in the southside of Glasgow, Scotland, exploded into an impromptu stand-off against police and deportation officers. Early on May 13,…