Diverting enough, Palm Springs is little more than a concept, and a borrowed one at that. To be fair, it's a bit different from Groundhog Day, in the sense that here there's a b.s. Hawk...
2020-11-10 19:38:27 +0000 UTC View Post
His House (Remi Weekes, 2020)
Thematically, haunted houses are all about history. As such, they can serve as a handy metaphor for personal as well as political scenarios, and it ta...
2020-11-10 02:55:43 +0000 UTC View Post
A curiosity. If you consider Promising Young Woman in the context of the broadly commercial revenge-thriller, comparing it to something like Hard Candy, it may seem audacious. It certai...
2020-11-08 12:33:53 +0000 UTC View Post
I was frankly so put off by the melancholy whimsy of Miranda July's first two features that I was kind of dreading Kajillionaire. Her first film, Me and You and Everyone We Know, worked...
2020-11-03 20:16:29 +0000 UTC View Post
THIS REVIEW IS EMBARGOED. SO KEEP IT IN THE FAMILY, PLEASE.
Much like this year's major sports championships, the 2020 Oscars will go down in the logbooks with an asterisk by the r...
2020-11-02 19:53:28 +0000 UTC View Post
I'm nervous. We're all nervous.
But here are some things to consider.
Today's tweet thread from Pol...
2020-11-02 15:36:31 +0000 UTC View Post
An undeniably bizarre film, Kung-fu Master! seems almost designed to, well, punch and kick at the boundaries of French cinematic lyricism. From its prosaic upper-middle class Parisian trappings ...
2020-11-01 19:37:19 +0000 UTC View Post
Neither as baldly declarative as Mangrove, nor as poetically open-form as Lovers Rock, Red, White and Blue splits the difference, resulting in the strongest mainstream film rel...
2020-11-01 04:05:16 +0000 UTC View Post
SOME SPOILERS AHEAD.
It has to be addressed right off the bat. Nasir is a didactic film. It is made with a very particular purpose in mind, and by the time it is over, the...
2020-11-01 00:00:24 +0000 UTC View Post
Sorry for the limited watching and writing in recent days. I have in the midst of a really hellacious headache cluster which has been slowing me down over the past week and a half. I have an appointment ...
2020-10-28 05:32:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Or: Paranoid Racist QAnon Wackos Say Darnedest Things: an Exposé For Make Benefit of Understone Dwellers During Trumptastic Years of 2016-2020.
Cheap shots at easy targets. Pretty much a ...
2020-10-26 02:58:07 +0000 UTC View Post
This is an utterly trivial film, but it's also kind of weird. It's really a fairly standard midlife crisis film from a woman's point of view. We've seen a lot of these in recent years, where a wife feels...
2020-10-26 02:49:42 +0000 UTC View Post
Although I hadn't remembered it until I checked my logs, I did see Ostrochovsky's debut feature, a film from 2015 called Koza. It was the story of a washed-up boxer trying to make a comeback bec...
2020-10-25 05:16:29 +0000 UTC View Post
This review will contain spoilers.
At first I found myself in a rather bothersome predicament. I was left cold by Charlie Kaufman's latest effort, and I suppose I could replace the...
2020-10-24 04:07:52 +0000 UTC View Post
It's true, Malmkrog isn't for everyone. But I must admit to a certain surprise at the criticisms directed at it by the reviewers for Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. It's not that I expect Pu...
2020-10-23 19:15:56 +0000 UTC View PostOkay, first things first. Are we sure we're not being punked?
Anyway, for the sake of argument, let's assume that the cinematic career of Michel Franco is a real thing, something we're sup...
2020-10-17 18:49:45 +0000 UTC View Post
The word on the street is true. Hlynur Pálmason's second film is a major leap forward from his already-impressive debut Winter Brothers. That film, which was largely characterized by its tonal ...
2020-10-16 19:46:34 +0000 UTC View Post
Okay, guys, it's Cinephile Confession Time. This is the first film I've seen by the acclaimed duo of Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross. In fact, awhile back I tried watching two of their films (45365...
2020-10-15 22:42:31 +0000 UTC View Post
Say, have you heard about essay films? They are all the rage right now. In fact, the Currents section of the New York Film Festival featured five of them, with their combinations of fact and fiction, the...
2020-10-13 18:14:30 +0000 UTC View Post
Hong operates in a minor key here, with the compositional interest primarily hinging on all the things he doesn't do. The Woman Who Ran doesn't scramble chronology, nor does it involve awkward, ...
2020-10-12 19:06:34 +0000 UTC View Post
I was asked to write a statement for the National Society of Film Critics relating to the Netflix indictment, which I've pasted below. So I tried watching the film, and made it 30 minutes through. And al...
2020-10-10 05:56:05 +0000 UTC View Post
At one point, during the final third of Dick Johnson Is Dead, the film's subject says something jarringly poignant to his daughter, the filmmaker. "I used to be your dad," he laments. "Now I'm y...
2020-10-10 04:55:24 +0000 UTC View Post
Dunn Rovinelli's So Pretty was a dense, complicated feature film that encompassed literary concerns, gender identity, the difficulties of collective resistance, and the entire question of whethe...
2020-10-08 23:02:53 +0000 UTC View Post
Did you know that Woody Allen had a new film this year? Apparently some nonsense called Rifkin's Festival, about a guy hanging out at the San Sebastian International Film Festival. It quietly wo...
2020-10-08 20:13:34 +0000 UTC View Post
As it happens, I already related most of my thoughts about this incredibly moving film in my third NYFF report for MUBI, which was mostly supposed to focus on the films in the Currents section. But I fou...
2020-10-08 04:23:37 +0000 UTC View Post
One of the most critically lauded documentary filmmakers of the moment, Gianfranco Rosi seems to define his films by geographical location rather than population or community. Granted, if you choose to l...
2020-10-06 22:52:38 +0000 UTC View Post
I must admit, I'm a bit confused by the fact that this rather pedestrian film is being hailed as a breakout for Olaizola. And to be honest, the more I think about it, the more I suspect that the acclaim ...
2020-10-06 19:29:13 +0000 UTC View Post
