Varda by Agnès, the final film by Agnès Varda, starts as a filmed masterclass. Varda sits before a rapt crowd and begins speaking of her work, her worldview, her creative approach, and her life. For an artist, life and work ar...
Midway through Céline Sciamma’s masterful Portrait of a Lady on Fire, we get the film’s thematic archstone. So much of this painterly, poetic queer romance is about looking at someone we desire and the feeling of being se...
The Irishman feels like it could be Martin Scorsese’s final film. It won’t be—he’s already working with Leonardo Di Caprio on Killers of the Flower Moon—and yet if you told me this was his last movie, I’d...
Montreal's Fantasia International Film Festival just announced its first wave of programming for 2019, and it looks like ya'll Canucks are going to be in for a good time. Leading the pack is the world premier of Killerman starring Liam Hems...
Sometimes I see a trailer for a movie, and it makes me wonder why other movies even bother to exist. This is definitely one such trailer. I'd never heard of Tammy and the T-Rex, a 90's (if you somehow couldn't tell from the trailer) horror...
Punk icon Glenn Dazig of Misfits is officially taking a stab at Rob Zombie's throne as the-metal-musician-who-also-makes-horror-movies with his first feature, Verotika, which will premier opening Chicago's 2019 Cinepocalypse Film Festival. ...
Film is a visual medium, yet if you remove or tweak the sound elements, the film seems less cinematic. Think about 2001: A Space Odyssey without the classical music cues, or a different T-Rex roar in Jurassic Park, or if the ambient sound i...
The 24-hour news cycle is ubiquitous yet ephemeral. Cable news networks have so much time to fill, but apart from select shows, the broadcasts are typically aired and forgotten, the footage rarely saved for posterity. That’s what make...
Thinking about the opening shot of Roma brings tears to my eyes. The centerpiece film at the 2018 New York Film Festival is a masterful display of Alfonso Cuaron’s craft, and how the magic of filmmaking can situate the mind in a speci...
Double, double toil and trouble, my little witches and warlocks, and welcome back to The 300, a recurring feature on my hellish attempt to watch 300 movies in theaters in the year 2018. I’ll be watching new releases, classics, hidden ...
Why hello there, rosebuds, and welcome back to The 300, a magnificent feature on my attempt to watch 300 movies in theaters in the year 2018. I’ll be watching new releases, classics, hidden gems, and festival films to experience the w...
Why howdy, partner, and welcome back to The 300, a rootin' tootin' feature on my wild attempt to watch 300 movies in theaters in the year 2018. I’ll be watching new releases, classics, hidden gems, and festival films to experience the...
Like Hail, Caesar!, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is a movie about movies. Hail, Caesar! took the tropes of the old-fashioned studio pictures and turned them into an interconnected backlot pastiche of cinematic styles. You had composites of ...
Greetings, sex astronauts, and welcome back to The 300, my high-flying attempt to watch 300 movies in theaters in the year 2018. I’ll be seeing new releases, classics, hidden gems, and festival films to experience the wide world of ci...
Hey, I’m walking here, and welcome back to The 300, my ratty attempt to watch 300 movies in theaters in the year 2018. I’ll be seeing new releases, classics, hidden gems, and festival films to experience the wide world of cinema...
Five self-appointed protectors watch over the railroad town of Marseilles. They ride through rolling parries, the rock faces of mountains filling the background. The iconography of the American western is alive and well through the South Af...
A mythic force is spiriting people away in a rundown Mexican town, leaving droves of abandoned children to cluster together and wander the streets themselves. This force is responsible for the disappearance of 10-year-old Estrella's (Paola ...
Tokyo Vampire Hotel has a scene in which a legless Geisha vampire who feeds people to the hotel through her vagina laughs maniacally as a fountain of blood streams from an open wound into her mouth and heavy metal music pulses and pounds in...
Let's get this out of the way right now: If you're a little girl alone in a creepy hotel at night, whatever you do, don't enter room 666. Age shouldn't even matter. Just don't do it. Parents need to teach their children some common sense. I...
Take a moment to consider how you would imagine a movie about cowboy-ideal-personified Sam Elliott as a man who kills both Hitler and Bigfoot in that order. Fire, tanks, action, Nazis, and then two major showdowns against one of the world's...
Chained for Life wastes no time introducing its main topic. A quote crawls the screen expressing that actors have to be beautiful, because being beautiful allows them to play anything. Soon, we see our beautiful actress, Mabel (Jess Weixler...
The Fantasia International Film Festival will be kicking off its 22nd iteration from July 12 through August 2 this year in Montreal, and it's packed with the strange and wonderful. I’m a big fan of the strange and wonderful, so I&rsqu...
All right now, boppers, welcome back to The 300, a recurring feature on my goofball quest to watch 300 movies in theaters in the year 2018. I’ll be watching new releases, classics, hidden gems, and festival films to experience the wid...
Hey there, gang, and welcome back to The 300, a recurring feature on my foolish quest to watch 300 movies in theaters in the year 2018. I’ll be watching new releases, classics, hidden gems, and festival films to experience the wide wo...
The 2018 Tribeca Film Festival gets underway tonight, running from April 18th through the 29th. The 17th year of the festival will showcase 93 feature films from more than 103 filmmakers, as well as TV premieres, shorts, virtual reality sho...
Academy Award nominee and Honorary Oscar winner Spike Lee’s filmed-play adaptation of newcomer Antoinette Nwandu’s Pass Over is set to release on April 20th by Amazon Studios. The play or the play within a film (in this case) p...
Richard Linklater's movies tend to work best when they feel like hanging out. There's a breeziness to the language as people walk, talk, and spend time with one another that resembles genuine conversation. The Before trilogy best exemplifie...
The Square, the latest film from Force Majeure director Ruben Östlund, reveals its entire thesis in its opening scenes. Anne, an art journalist (Elizabeth Moss), interviews Christian, an art museum curator (Claes Bang). She quotes a bi...
All happy families are the same; each unhappy family is only sort of the same, and will eventually wind up in their own movie or book. Take the Meyerowitzes in Noah Baumbach's latest movie. This sophisticated clan of New Yorkers reminded of...
Each critic has their own process. Some take notes while watching a film and others will rush home to type up their thoughts immediately after a showing. Others still don't write anything for a while, preferring to mull it all over in their...
Giddens Ko’s You Are the Apple of My Eye remains one of the best films I’ve seen at the New York Asian Film Festival. Café. Waiting. Love, which he wrote but did not direct, is another film I enjoyed immensely. So when I ...
It's that time of year again. One of the best film festivals in the city is about to get underway. The New York Asian Film Festival kicks off tonight at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. The annual showcase of Asian cinema runs from June ...
The B-Side is an atypical Errol Morris documentary. He doesn't use the Interrotron at all, his tool that allows interviewees to stare directly into the camera. Instead, the camera's just off to the side. The score is delicate rather than a ...
Steve James may be incapable of directing a bad documentary. His films includes Hoop Dreams, The Interrupters, and Life Itself. With Abacus: Small Enough to Jail, James continues his record as one of America's most reliable non-fiction...
The Circle is the paranoid techno-dystopian thriller of 2006 released in 2017 and based on a Dave Eggers novel published in 2013. The film's concerns about technology and social media are so dated and quaint, like the stuff an older relativ...
Before sitting down to watch Gilbert, I was afraid the documentary would take away from Gilbert Gottfried's mystique. I always loved his impersonations and appearances on Howard Stern, and his dirty jokes have such craft behind them, elevat...
There's a familiar narrative about the self-destructive artist, or maybe it's one that we want to see borne out in real life and in narratives about artists as characters. The brilliant artist is ignored but persists in their craft, achieve...
The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson is an engrossing watch that works on different levels and through different modes. At the outset, it seems like the documentary will take the form of an obsessive detective story/murder mystery. Victo...
Juzo Itami's Tampopo was a quirky blend of western tropes and epicurean delight. SABU's Mr. Long is sort of like a nihilistic Tampopo. We follow a skilled assassin from Taiwan named Long (a brooding Chen Chang) who gets waylaid after a botc...
Given how the Republican Party speaks of Ronald Reagan, he feels more like some cowboy legend than an American president. This speaks to Reagan's image consciousness as a politician, with a carefully cultivated persona that fed into the ide...
