It becomes clear very early on that the new documentary CHAOS: The Manson Murders is going to be largely incoherent. What is unclear is how…
There have been many movies about baseball, that most American of sports — it is axiomatic. They can be nostalgic, romantic, or even, increasingly, tech-inflected…
Matías Piñeiro is best known for loosely adapting Shakespearean texts via small-scaled, interpersonal dramas: Twelfth Night in Viola; Measure for Measure in Isabella; Love’s Labour’s…
Coming-of-age movies are a dime a dozen, at this point practically an entire sub-genre of Sundance-approved indie calling cards. Which is perhaps why Henry Bernadet’s…
In his recent book Filmmakers Thinking, Adrian Martin quotes the German filmmaker Hartmut Bitomsky at length regarding the “dialogues” that all filmmakers are engaged in;…
You’ve got a really good cast doing sturdy, reliable work in an otherwise largely generic crime dramedy with Riff Raff, the latest from director Dito…
It’s difficult to know what to do with the films of Mickey Keating; finding success in low-budget indie filmmaking should always be applauded, but frequently…
It’s entirely possible, even likely, that the person reading this review right now has never heard of Edward Burns, let alone seen any of his…
Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950) would be Otto Preminger’s last film for 20th Century Fox, capping off a productive (if tumultuous) chapter in the director’s…
Filmed almost entirely on location in the dense forests of Sikkim, the northeasternmost state of India, Bhargav Saikia’s Bokshi is a wildly ambitious debut feature,…
The best thing that can be said for co-writer/director Þórður Pálsson’s debut feature film The Damned is that it looks and feels like a real…
The beginning of Jack Clark and Jim Weir’s debut feature, Birdeater, condenses the relationship of Louie (Mackenzie Fearnley) and Irene (Shabana Azeez) into an extended, almost…
It’s been a couple of years now, but it’s still disconcerting to see the classic MGM logo in front of Amazon streaming movies. It’s flagrant…
Since his 2011 debut feature Snowtown, Justin Kurzel’s films have displayed a laser-like focus on rough, sometimes savage men and the environments that foster their…
Grindhouse aficionados likely need no introduction to J. Michael Muro and Roy Frumkes’ 1987 splatter-fest Street Trash, a grungy cult-favorite about tainted liquor melting the…
Now with three feature films under his belt, Tyler Taormina has become our premier chronicler of a certain kind of suburban dreamscape — opaque, occasionally…
Robin Wood begins the introduction to his 1965 book Hitchcock’s Films with a question: “Why should we take Hitchcock seriously?” It’s a deceptively simple query; as…
Writer-director David Moreau has set himself a tall task with his new film MadS, namely how to rejuvenate the moribund zombie sub-genre while also justifying…
While it’s undoubtedly true that every era of cinema likely produced more mediocrities than masterpieces, the dirty little secret of our streaming era is that…
As successful as Coppola was in the 1970s, with four consecutive films garnering massive critical and/or box office success, the 1980s proved to be a…