The release of a new Tim Burton film prompts any number of critical referendums on the filmmaker’s work and legacy. For critics of a…
To its considerable credit, Stephen Soucy’s recent documentary, Merchant Ivory (2024), resists the tendency toward hagiography. It’s an understandably tempting opportunity, composed as the…
At a moment of especially heightened anxiety occurring — when else? — during Shabbat dinner, one of Between the Temples’ wiser characters offers a…
First, the camera presents a world for the song to take place in. A spike of sky above a statue that reaches upward forever,…
Over the course of a single night, two couples trade psychic and physical blows over shared and shattered illusions about the business of connection…
Like an oak presiding over what came before and what might follow, Kier-La Janisse’s documentary study Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched (2021) roots folk…
Where does a song come from? And how does it happen? In November 2021, driven back inside to obsess about air particles again thanks…
Late in Mary Chase’s Pulitzer-winner, Harvey, the theme of the play is delivered by — who else? — a salty cab-driver. The aptly-named E.J.…
The film begins with a man and a tripod. He swivels, shifts his body, scrutinizes the line. He’s not making moving pictures, living as…
Maybe more than any of its brethren of subgenre monsters, the exorcism film The Exorcist (1973) looms large over its brood of descendants. There…
One thing left uncertain: just who are Dorothy Gale’s parents? I don’t quite mean that literally, though the overgrown Oz extended universe probably has…
s1e1 – “Pilot” I have been thinking about Robin Wood and playing foxtail in a front yard that smelled like Sugar Maple leaves and…
The first onscreen image in Faceless After Dark (2023), is, perhaps in deliberate tension with the film’s title, a human face. It is bloodied,…