iIf there’s one thing the Japanese genre filmmakers whose work turns up at U.S. festivals tend to nail, it’s masterfully creating a sense of inescapable existentialist dread. At this year’s Fantastic Fest, two films bummed me out beautifully — a nice distraction from the ugly bum-out of the all the…
Out of the eighty-two feature films at Fantastic Fest this year, eleven were directed by women, and four of those were co-directed by a man. For the slow in math, that means women directed only about 13 percent, which is pretty dismal, though on par with Cannes and 8 percent…
One of the most hilarious things I’ve ever seen on television comes early in The Langoliers, a 1995 ABC miniseries adapted by Tom Holland from a Stephen King novella. It’s the one about a small group of travelers waking up on a red-eye flight to discover that most of the…
Julia Solomonoff’s third feature finds the accomplished Argentine director in a naturalistic year-in-the-life mode, examining the somewhat aimless expatriate life of a Buenos Aires soap opera hunk in Brooklyn and Manhattan. As in her 2009 film, The Last Summer of La Boyita, Solomonoff here exhibits a scrupulous control of her…
When Jason Fitzroy Jeffers shows up for a late breakfast to discuss the second-annual Third Horizon Caribbean Film Festival in the wake of Hurricane Irma, he’s rocking some puffy bags under his eyes. It’s been a rough two weeks for the festival’s cofounder/director and his crew of collaborators — an…
Lording over the colonies is all bore and bother for the queen in Stephen Frears’ sumptuous yet centerless Victoria & Abdul. The film dramatizes Queen Victoria’s spirited friendship with Abdul Karim, a charming clerk from northern India who — in this telling — jolts the Empress of India from her…
In Battle of the Sexes, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’ film rehashing the most infamous tennis match in modern history, Billie Jean King (Emma Stone) must brawl with the coed United States Tennis Association for equal pay as she comes to terms with her attraction to women and what might be…
Just a little more than three months ago, Tom Cruise starred in a lifeless wannabe-blockbuster called The Mummy that made little use of his innate charisma (shut up, he still has some) or his star persona, turning him into an anonymous action hero. Now comes American Made, a picture that…
BoJack Horseman streams on Netflix It’s not a huge surprise that my sensitive and kind-hearted spouse could be left sobbing by an episode of a popular TV show. She’d say herself that she’s an easy mark, TV showrunners. But it’s definitely a surprise when any show even tries. TV writers…
Mike White’s father-and-son college-trip comedy-drama Brad’s Status is legitimately more frightening than anything in It. Quite aside from the fact that real life is always scarier than monsters from the beyond, the writer-director’s deep understanding of envy, entitlement and embarrassment has never been more nightmarishly effective. But don’t expect one…
If it’s been too long since you’ve had a dose of the Miami Film Festival, there’s good news: GEMS is returning to satiate your filmgoing desires. Now in its third year, the 2017 edition of the fest will take place October 12 through 15 at Miami Dade College’s Tower Theater. And the full lineup has plenty to get you excited.
Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! is so much movie that critics April Wolfe and Alan Scherstuhl have elected to sync up Pacific Rim-style to take it on. Warning: The discussion below delves right into what we might call spoilers if a movie like Mother! could be spoiled. Now let’s drift. April: Each…
The sequel to 2015’s hit Kingsman: The Secret Service won’t make you feel the urgent need to take a shower and/or throw up, like the original probably did. Believe it or not, that’s not always a good thing. Kingsman: The Golden Circle, Matthew Vaughn’s follow-up to his brutal, joyfully degenerate…
There’s no delicate way to say this, so I’ll just spit it out. I spent the first 10 minutes of Stronger, David Gordon Green’s eventually potent drama of trauma and recovery, trying to work out whether star Jake Gyllenhaal was intending to suggest that the real-life Bostonian at the story’s…
The documentary section of TIFF has a reputation for programming the types of films that can easily compete for audience attention with the narrative juggernauts, and this year is no different. From Agnes Varda’s wacky travelogue Faces Places to Frederick Wiseman’s ode to the New York Public Library Ex Libris,…
Writer-director Dee Rees is breaking all the rules with her third feature, Mudbound. In film school, they tell you, “No voiceovers,” yet this film about two WWII and post-war Mississippi families — one black, one white — is filthy with them. They tell you, “Play it safe until you’re more…
Filmmaking is not a poor man’s game. Even as digital cameras get cheaper, making a festival-worthy film still requires dough to get off the ground, which means the folks who tell stories through cinema tend to come from backgrounds of privilege. That breeds movies aimed at middle- to upper-class people,…
In Columbus, architecture takes the place of emotions, to sometimes startling effect. An outwardly chilly, resolutely static film that nevertheless finds poignancy in the most surprising places, Kogonada’s directorial debut does a couple of important things so well that I can’t help but forgive the things it doesn’t. (Kogonada, by…
I’d gone into the theater knowing nothing of the Chloe Zhao’s The Rider except that my colleague Bilge Ebiri adored it — and that I’d get to to witness some breathtaking cinematography capturing the dusky pastels streaking the American West. (I did.) For the first 20 minutes, I was transfixed…
Dictators are a certain kind of selfish, insecure insanity made manifest, and if you’re going to study them, Joseph Stalin is a good place to start. “Stalin” wasn’t even his real name. When he was 30, he changed it, so it would be “man of steel” in Russian — imagine…
The tragic truth remains that all it takes in America for a white person to get away with killing a black person is for the white person to convince the right people — a judge, a jury, a prosecutor — of his or her own fear. If a white person…
It would have been easy for Angelina Jolie’s adaptation of Cambodian genocide survivor Loung Ung’s 2000 memoir to go ruthlessly and repeatedly for the emotional jugular. First They Killed My Father is, after all, the story of a young girl hurled into one of the 20th century’s most unthinkable nightmares…
