It’s not uncommon to see critics waxing nostalgic for the so-called good old days of network TV. Long seasons, filler episodes, a certain Law & Order je nais se quoi. I generally don’t go in for this line of thinking. You turn on CBS or ABC any night of the week, you’ll see plenty of th...
2025-04-11 19:53:24 +0000 UTC View Post
“How dark are you willing to go?” aging businessman Karsh (Vincent Cassel) asks his date in the opening scene of The Shrouds. “Not terribly” appears to be the film’s answer. From its flat outdoor digital photography to its heavy reliance on various shades of terrible CGI, the whole prod...
2025-04-10 22:00:36 +0000 UTC View Post
“No one in the history of the world has lived better than we have,” drawls Victoria Ratliff (Parker Posey) with the particular flavor of self-satisfied tranquility only upper-class pill addicts can conjure. “Not even the old kings and queens. The least we can do is enjoy it. If we don’t, ...
2025-04-07 03:56:46 +0000 UTC View Post
“Stupid and mean,” turns out to be the register in which Osgood Perkins goes, for me, from a talentless tryhard auteur to a straightforwardly enjoyable, if not particularly inspired, B-movie gross-out guy. The Monkey is dumb, nasty, and often pretty funny, a far cry from the airless, overwrit...
2025-04-06 04:40:21 +0000 UTC View Post
Black Bag is gorgeous. Its forced-perspective long shots of sterile, barren offices and exquisite modern dining rooms are a feast, its palette of gentle golds, browns, creams, and grays so obviously chosen with the same meticulous attention to detail with which the film’s protagonists, married ...
2025-04-06 01:16:09 +0000 UTC View Post
“This whole country is one big strip club,” says dancer and con artist Ramona Vega (Jennifer Lopez) to the officers interrogating her. In the words of my great uncle, she’s blowing smoke, but the smoke ain’t wrong. Set in the economic and social wreckage of the 2008 financial crisis, Hust...
2025-04-01 02:07:07 +0000 UTC View Post
“Very student film,” Noah (Martin Henderson) quips upon seeing the haunted tape at the heart of Gore Verbinski’s The Ring. He’s right, in a way. Like the darkly prophetic scribblings created by Noah’s eight-year-old son, Aiden (David Dorfman), the tape is the work of a child. It’s a c...
2025-03-30 20:48:25 +0000 UTC View Post
“Grief transcends value,” says the nameless Jefe (Rubén Blades) of the drug cartel pursuing the titular Counselor (Michael Fassbender). “A man would trade whole nations for one more hour with his beloved, but he can get nothing for his grief, because grief is worthless.” The discursive, ...
2025-03-30 03:18:49 +0000 UTC View Post
It’s pretty revealing that English-speaking countries chose to market Bertrand Bonello’s 2011 drama about the workers of a Parisian brothel at the turn of the 19th century under the alternate title House of Pleasures. This is not a titillating film about the secret lives of sex workers. It’...
2025-03-26 19:00:30 +0000 UTC View Post
There’s a postcard quality to much of Guadagnino’s framing in Queer, everything cleanly set apart, shadow and light contrasted thoughtfully, sometimes a single element out of place, just to draw attention. A stray dog sniffing at the dirt in an empty street. The moon seen smeared and rippled ...
2025-03-25 01:37:33 +0000 UTC View Post
Control Freak is not a perfect movie. Far from it. Its symbolic and thematic languages are unwieldy, getting tripped up on themselves as it struggles to make a coherent story out of the lingering horror of the Vietnam War, immigrant mental health struggles, and assimilationist rejection ...
2025-03-16 18:04:19 +0000 UTC View Post
Stephen Graham manages to make “Eat your cornflakes” sound like a doctor giving a five-year-old’s parent their child’s cancer diagnosis before clearing his throat and saying it again in a tone of forced cheer. It’s fitting. His world is over. His teenage son is a murderer, a gi...
2025-03-15 16:12:25 +0000 UTC View Post
Wes Anderson was my very first Favorite Director. Watching The Royal Tenenbaums at the age of thirteen did as much to kindle my love of film as any other single event in my life, and for the next decade I watched and re-watched it along with The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, <...
2025-03-08 21:20:36 +0000 UTC View Post
It’s not writer/director Bong Joon-ho’s tightest movie, or the best collection of performances he’s managed to get out of a cast. Mark Ruffalo and Toni Colette skew a little too broad in the roles of dictatorial expedition commander Kenneth Marshall and his wife, Ylfa, rendering Bong’s sa...
2025-03-08 07:24:25 +0000 UTC View Post
It’s about Trump. Born Again makes no bones whatsoever about this, and it’s better for it, charging out of the gate in a wave of ‘Fisk Can Fix It’ baseball caps and scumbags talking approvingly about how newly inaugurated mayor Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) “gets shit done”. Aga...
2025-03-05 05:57:45 +0000 UTC View Post
Was there a funnier scene in film last year than Anora (Mikey Madison) fighting like an irate rattlesnake against three full-grown men as they try to manhandle, browbeat, and threaten her into agreeing to get an annulment in her husband’s parents’ living room? If there was, I didn’t see it....
2025-03-05 03:13:06 +0000 UTC View Post
There’s something so beautiful about playing the classics straight with real craft and skill to back it up. Fair maidens and unicorns, demonic lords of darkness brooding on their thrones. This stuff is as shopworn as it gets, so fundamental to fantasy as a genre that it can feel like the idea o...
2025-03-03 06:33:08 +0000 UTC View Post
In almost every film I’ve ever reviewed, no matter how dismal, I’ve found some scintilla of beauty or vision, some idiosyncratic touch worthy of dissection or appreciation. You can spend half a review talking about a single genuine moment, a single beautiful shot or brilliantly realized effec...
2025-03-02 07:18:33 +0000 UTC View Post
There’s a little too much of the currently omnipresent orange and blue color scheme at play in Steven Knight’s A Thousand Blows, and that’s about the harshest thing I can find to say about it. The rest is a real delight, and the first thing since Deadwood to really foregro...
2025-02-26 21:10:16 +0000 UTC View Post
“Is there a better description of a cube than its own construction?” asks László Tóth (Adrien Brody) in one of his first conversations with his mercurial, selfish soon-to-be patron, the millionaire businessman Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pierce). It’s a haunting thought. When in the film’s...
2025-02-22 04:57:24 +0000 UTC View Post
When congressman Raymond Prentiss Shaw (Liev Schrieber) sees his one-time girlfriend Jocelyn Jordan (Vera Farmiga) at a political event at the Botanical Gardens, she’s so luminous she’s almost bleeding color onto the film. Her eyes are a wild electric blue, her skin glowing, as though she and...
2025-02-15 08:10:33 +0000 UTC View Post
Things fall apart. Yeats said it, but the Safdie Brothers have made a career out of depicting it on film. Watching Good Time feels like standing in the shadow of a collapsing skyscraper, five hundred thousand tons of rebar and concrete cascading toward you, dust flooding the streets in a...
2025-02-11 06:26:39 +0000 UTC View Post
Starving Arctic fishermen on a lethally beautiful sweep of stone and ice, a nightmarish shipwreck, a gruesome revenant limping out of Norse folklore and into reality — The Damned has a lot going for it, at least on a conceptual level. The minute Ragnar (Rory McCann) goes into the water...
2025-02-09 19:48:40 +0000 UTC View PostThe house of Ula Se Barat was not grand by Gujirati standards, but its gardens deserved every word of praise Hathi had ever heard for them. Willows trailed their branches over ornamental ponds where lotus blossoms drifted on the water and segmented scolopedes and golden carp swam leisurely among ...
2025-02-07 07:32:12 +0000 UTC View Post
My old friend the TV critic Sean T. Collins once said that one mark of genius in writing is when a sudden reversal feels shocking in the moment and inevitable in hindsight. That’s ‘Shut the Door, Have a Seat’ in a nutshell, an episode that takes a season’s worth of bickering, friction, an...
2025-02-06 05:29:06 +0000 UTC View Post
“That’s life. One minute you’re on top of the world, the next minute some secretary's running you over with a lawn mower.” Absurdity is the word of the day in ‘Guy Walks Into an Advertising Agency’, a mid-season showstopper in which Don, Joan, Roger, Lane Pryce (Jared Harris), and Ber...
2025-02-05 22:36:39 +0000 UTC View Post
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” George Santayana said that in 1905, and people have been misquoting it ever since. ‘My Old Kentucky Home’ invites us to remember our own past in the light of people incapable of remembering theirs. Watching Roger Sterling se...
2025-02-05 21:32:40 +0000 UTC View Post
“If I don’t go into that office every day,” says Freddy Rumsen (Joel Murray), “who am I?” It’s a question Don is clearly asking himself about his own absence from his household following his separation from Betty. What defines a person when routine falls away? Look at Betty, drifting ...
2025-02-05 03:30:52 +0000 UTC View PostSlava hated her camel. She had named him Fjardin, after her least favorite uncle, owing to their shared love of spitting, their foul smell, and their bushy eyebrows. He in turn bore her no affection, attempting to bite her whenever she dismounted, kicking out at her with his huge padded feet when...
2025-02-04 21:58:42 +0000 UTC View PostRupa knelt outside her mistress’s bedchamber, listening to the sound of the emperor making love. It had been months since the Most High had visited the Third Consort, and still longer between that visit and the one before. Rupa didn’t know what had brought him flying through the palace halls ...
2025-02-04 21:56:06 +0000 UTC View Post