Film Reviews, Interviews and Articles
Andrea Riseborough may be our greatest under-appreciated actress working today. Delivering standout turns in indie favorites like Mandy, Possessor, and Birdman as well as leading Amazon’s excellent crime drama ZeroZeroZero, Riseborough has slowly proven herself a transfixing chameleon presence. A la the great Tilda Swinton, with whom she shares vampiric lily white skin and sharp angular features, Riseborough creeps into the skin of her roles, the real persona rarely peeking through. Read More
Eco-horror is having a resurgence of late, as are psilocybin mushrooms as a visual language in film. Jaco Bouwer’s formidable woodland creeper Gaia fits snugly into a recent wave of psychedelic folk horror, a subgenre that binds Ari Aster’s Midsommar, Alex Garland’s Annihilation, Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth (a recent Sundance release that would make a pitch perfect double feature with Bouwer’s entry) and even Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Sparked by an increasing awareness of humanity’s abusive relationship with nature, eco-horror pits the survival of man and earth against one another and in the light of a global pandemic, those themes have never been as prescient. Read More
Hope is a hammer, Ady Barkan attempts to say. His tongue, lungs, and the rest of his body devastated by ALS (an incurable degenerative disease that paralyzes and eventually kills its victims), Ady tries again and again but just can’t get the words out to the audience of thousands gathered to hear the American healthcare activist speak. This moment, one of many heartbreaking scenes in Nicholas Bruckman’s not-so-quietly devastating documentary Not Going Quietly, perhaps best encapsulates the ironic paradox of Ady’s emergent and often viral voice: the more his body fails him, the less he is physically able to move and speak, the more he has to say and the more people gather to listen to him. Read More
In present-ish day Brazil, the fight for reparations for citizens of African descent reaches a violent impasse. Lawyer Antônio (Alfred Enouch) wants his government to impose equitable laws to atone for the nation’s past sins, chief amongst them slavery, but the fascistic government opts instead to offer a one-way ticket way “back to Africa” as a kind of mocking fuck you to the idea of reparations. Confusion, outrage, and mockery follows but the high-melanized (the term “black” has fallen out of politically-correct vogue) population have no idea how bad things will soon get when the government imposes an executive order that will instead force any citizen with a hint of melanin out of Brazil and back to Africa. Read More
Timing is a fickle thing and often means a world of difference. Timing divides those who murder the stock market and those that are steamrolled by it. It’s the difference between perfectly scrambled eggs and inedible burnt yellow mush. And in the case of recently broken-up Nick (Ben Coleman) and Leah (Ali Vingiano), bad timing means that you have to quarantine with your ex during the COVID-19 stay-at-home order in The End of Us. Read More
I’m calling an early shot here: if there’s one movie out of Sundance 2020 that stands a decent shot at a Best Picture nomination almost a year from now, it’s very likely The Courier (formerly titled Ironbark). The Cold War espionage thriller takes a classical approach to its telling, leaning into familiar biopic/historical nonfiction tropes, while viewing events through an extremely humanistic lens. Read More
A few nights into a mysterious university sleep study, Sarah finds herself perusing a bookshop, pulled towards the Phillip K. Dick entries on the shelf. Jeremy, her primary researcher and maybe-stalker, suggests she give Dick a read, referring to his work as “hauntingly sad”. This description – hauntingly sad – accurately captures the weirdly affecting (and low-key terrifying) tonality of Come True, a descent into sleep paralysis and ancestral nightmares coming to life. Vividly tragic, but always in a darkly unspeakable way, Come True captures that in-between realm separating sleep and dreams and twists it into a malevolent manifesto about the collective terror that lingers in the mysterious netherworld of slumber. Read More
For the better part of a century, Disney has been carefully formulating a template for blockbusting success. Churning out mega-hit after mega-hit on a semi-annual basis is no happy accident and the family-friendly behemoth has gotten that formula down pat – they’ve even exported it to the god-knows-how-many subdivisions of their corporate content creation stations. But going into any Disney animated movie specifically, you have a basic idea of what to expect: there will be a brave, slightly defiant female protagonist who doesn’t quite fit in with her community; an unbearably cute little animal sidekick who manages to be snarky even if they can’t talk; a quest to restore a kingdom; and a dead parent or two. You can never forget about the dead parent bit. Read More
Once you pop you just can’t stop. Or so goes the philosophy of the Joe and Anthony Russo when it comes to telling the story of a college-drop-out turned bank-robbing, dope-addicted war vet in Cherry. The directorial pair who rose to the highest of box office heights helming a handful of Marvel’s most critical and commercial smashes (including the last two Avengers mega-hits) prove uneasy with actual drama. Their telling of Nico Walker’s semi-autobiographical best-seller of the same name – adapted in part by screenwriters Angela Russo-Otstot and Jessica Goldberg, is meandering and unjustifiable long-winded. Read More
J Blakeson’s I Care a Lot wears a lot of hats. What starts as a genuinely electrifying satire centered around a morally repugnant legal guardian who grifts the elderly out of their assets and autonomy slinks into all kinds of genre territory; becoming at various points a pulpy thriller, a tongue-in-cheek dark comedy, and a pointed takedown of our national tendency to slide the old and aging out of public view. It is at times trying to do too many things, and is noticeably better in certain arenas than others, but when Blakeson’s lampoon of carnivorous capitalism sinks its teeth in deep and his performers rein fire and brimstone down upon each other, I Care a Lot‘s fiendish joys are simply irresistible. Read More