The exorcism and possession subgenre has been at a creative stall basically since its heyday in the 1970s. The panoply of genre tropes looks more…
Cynical perhaps, but it feels safe to assume in 2025 that a majority of Americans do not know that Rhodesia was a country, let alone…
There are two popular theories about the etymology of Prvić, a Croatian island in the Šibenik archipelago. The first theory relates to its closest proximity…
There probably isn’t a company on earth better associated with immediacy than Amazon. Unless one lives in the remotest regions of Canada or Alaska, there…
Cinematographer Bill Pope must have done something awful in 2022. Maybe he ran over some studio executive’s cat or perhaps his children beat out the…
Most legacy sequels frustrate in their imprisonment to the original films. The character cameos, repeated iconic lines, and mystery linkages between the past and the…
Biblical scholars and theologians use “antediluvian” to describe the world of Genesis between the fall from Eden and the flood. Literally meaning “before the flood,”…
Given a title like The Old Woman with the Knife, viewers will likely enter expecting to see an old woman killing people with a knife.…
Tony Jaa, action cinema’s favorite Muay Thai fighter, has faded from the limelight a bit after a quiet decade so far. He entered into it…
The crime genre bleeds blue. Crimes tend to be bad, and that makes it easy to establish the police, by the nature of their work,…
In a movie titled A Normal Family, one thing can be certain: the family is obligated to abnormality. Hur Jin-ho’s newest film, an adaptation of…
The most experimental regional cinema in the world might belong to the Arab Levant. As a region destabilized by a non-Indigenous oppressive neighbor for virtually…
Last year at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Estonian art film 8 Views of Lake Biwa translated a Japanese storytelling tradition of “eight views”…
An improbable 14 films in, and the Star Trek franchise has finally delivered its first truly unwatchable feature film. It’s difficult to think of a…
Some movies are so bad that you stop watching them. Life is too short to endure consumerist rubbish that affronts art. Other movies are so…
There is no perfect formula for a first scene — art is simply too complex to make such generalizations. The pulsing action of Jackie Chan’s…
Our multiplexes and home theaters desperately miss the erotic thriller. Every few years, one or two squeaky clean PG-13 studio productions will don the mask…
Aberdeen offers unfortunate proof — not that any was really needed — of how hard it is for well-intentioned films addressing important subject matter to…
Any movie that features a theater critic as a main character invites more intentional criticism from even lay viewers through the mere recognition that the…
Hero is one of the great films by one of the world’s most brilliant image-makers in Zhang Yimou, shot by one of the world’s most…
Money speaks everywhere in the world and in all creative industries, so Dancing Village: The Curse Begins comes as no surprise following KKN di Desa…