Owing as much to the Italian giallo films of the 60s and 70s such as Suspiria as it does to Stanley Kubrick at his most arch with A Clockwork Orange, Peter Strickland’s In Fabric blazes out of the gates as one of the loopiest, most gorgeously shot thrillers I’ve seen in ages. Although set in... Continue Reading →
Existing in some No Man’s Land between Life Is Beautiful and Defiance, writer/director Jonathan Jakubowicz's Resistance tells the true story of the most famous mime in history, Marcel Marceau. Rather than focusing on how he slid his hands along invisible walls or held non-existent umbrellas, we experience his talents at the start of Hitler’s occupation... Continue Reading →
By now, we all know Judd Apatow makes long movies. With the right script, premise and actors, however, you may find yourself having a great time basking in his universe. He takes his time, allows for breathing room, and essentially makes mumblecore movies on a large scale. Call it Jumbocore. With his latest, The King... Continue Reading →
With their feature film debut, director Andrew Patterson and his co-writer Craig W. Sanger have made an idiosyncratic splash with the micro budget yet winning sci-fi mystery, The Vast Of Night. Set in 1950s small town New Mexico, the film begins with a Twilight Zone style introduction as we push in on an old fashioned... Continue Reading →
Chip Gutchell feels dead inside. An office IT drone who goes through the motions with his wife, he seems sapped of joy until one day at a scheduled prostate exam, he discovers he likes things stuck up his butt. He starts out innocently enough, inserting small objects, but when larger, breathing things go missing in... Continue Reading →
We all have gaps in our moviegoing experiences. I’ve never seen It Happened One Night and only very recently did I watch It’s A Wonderful Life. In February, Janus Films released a 2K restoration of Come And See, a Soviet-era film from 1985 which depicts the horrors of World War II from a child’s perspective,... Continue Reading →
A couple of years ago, I went with a group to see Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again. Despite the thuddingly bad writing, we’d giddily wonder what ABBA song the filmmakers would shoehorn into the next musical number. I remember my pal Dennis seeing those platform soles stepping out of a helicopter and loudly exclaiming,... Continue Reading →
A classic satire comes along every so often to remind me, more than other film genres, that great art can come with a sucker punch to the frontal lobes. Movies such as Network, Nightcrawler, Heathers, and The Lobster remind us that when humans go bad, it’s tragic yet devastatingly entertaining. In 1999, Alexander Payne brought... Continue Reading →
What an exciting time we had in the 90s when it came to the emergence of what was called “The New Queer Cinema”. Films such as Todd Haynes’ Poison, Gregg Araki’s The Living End, Ana Kokkinos’ Head On, or the late great and dearly missed Richard Glatzer’s debut with Grief, to name a few, had... Continue Reading →
As much as I liked Eliza Hittman’s last film, Beach Rats, I wrote at the time that despite having style to burn, I wasn’t convinced she had anything new to say. It came across as a Larry Clark/Terrence Malick/Andrea Arnold summit meeting. With her new film, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, she has truly found her... Continue Reading →
