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...
Almost everyone could benefit from a little bit of therapy, especially therapists themselves. I often wonder what sorts of anxieties therapists have to deal with after they've finished dealing with clients for the day. Empathy and patience ...
Like so many other underrated actresses, Amy Ryan is always good in whatever she's in. She's also so versatile when she's on screen, able to excel in oddball comedy as well as subtle character dramas. In Angus MacLachlan's Abundant Acreage ...
Flames offers an intriguing premise. Part documentary and part art movie, co-directors Josephine Decker and Zefrey Throwell document their relationship as it falls apart. We start with the two of them in the best part of any relationship, w...
There are so many possibilities in My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea, the directorial debut of indie comics artist Dash Shaw. There's the image of an entire high school building adrift on the ocean and sinking. Think Lord of the Fl...
Makoto Shinkai's Your Name is the highest-grossing anime film of all-time, and it hasn't even come out in the United States yet. It beat Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away; give it a few more months and Your Name may beat Spirited Away as the h...
Louis Theroux won me over many years ago with the show Weird Weekends. In each episode, Theroux embedded himself in a subculture and use his extreme mild-mannered niceness to disarm his subjects. He'd hang out with porn stars, demolition dr...
Reviewing We Are the Flesh from writer/director Emiliano Rocha Minter is tricky. On the one hand, it's a deeply flawed film aimed at a limited audience. It's transgressive in the extreme, sexually explicit bordering on pornographic, nonsens...
There's no way Toni Erdmann could ever live up to its hype. Reviews from Cannes and the Toronto International Film Festival touted the German film as a 162-minute screwball comedy masterpiece, packed with high emotional stakes and major lau...
Bureaucracies make great villains. Faceless and absurd, they operate in such nefarious ways and are perfect machines for dehumanization. Bureaucracies are reliably inefficient, needlessly hierarchical, ruthlessly procedure-obsessed, and alw...
There's so much going for Lucile Hadzihalilovic's Evolution, a film expertly lensed from the deliberate first shot: looking up to the sky from underwater. From beneath, the ripples and waves on the ocean surface produce undulating shadows, ...
Watching Manchester by the Sea, I was reminded of two lines from the musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch: "I cry, because I will laugh if I don't" and "I laugh, because I will cry if I don't". Kenneth Lonergan's latest film is filled with con...
13TH feels like a culmination of Ava DuVernay's career to this point. The documentary brings together the racial and social history of Selma, her years of work as a documentarian, her stint as a journalist, and even her undergraduate degree...
Elle has been billed as a rape-comedy, but that's a misnomer. It's a comedy in the classical sense given the events of the story, but it's not necessarily funny (there are funny scenes, though). And yes, it's about rape. Elle has been laude...
Weiner is an appropriate film to review on Election Day, and not just because it's one of the best political documentaries of the last 10 years. Former Congressman Anthony Weiner potentially put the 2016 election in jeopardy last week. Whil...
The first thing I noticed about Peter Dunning, the subject of the documentary Peter and the Farm, was his injured hand. It's gnarled and he's missing fingers, and at 68 years old he's managed to function with just a thumb and two digits as ...
