Written and directed by Zach Cregger, Barbarian deftly uses the familiar mechanics of the the horror genre to build in dread at every turn. The style and visual wit Cregger brings to the proceedings would be impressive enough on its … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2022 — Number Six
Causeway (Lila Neugebauer, 2022). In a welcome return to a more small-scale drama, Jennifer Lawrence plays Lynsey, a soldier who returns to her home city of New Orleans after sustaining a traumatic brain injury while deployed in Afghanistan. Lawrence is … Continue reading Then Playing — Causeway; All Quiet on the Western Front; Remember My Name
Playing the title character in Pearl, Mia Goth has two different scenes that instantly feel like the stuff of film acting legend. The first is a lengthy monologue held in a single shot, Goth’s Pearl finally expressing to someone else … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2022 — Number Seven
The highly meme-able joke that’s been running at a brisk sprint ever since the release of Tár, the third feature from writer-director Todd Field, is that seemingly intelligent, discerning viewers are confused about whether the film depicts the downfall of … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2022 — Number Eight
For the First Time Ever, I’m Optimistic About Women in the Movie World by Manohla Dargis Writing for The New York Times, Manohla Dargis surveys the state of the entertainment industry’s openness to women filmmakers and, for maybe the first … Continue reading Outside Reading — Women Helming
Understandable as the broadly adopted choice might be, it’s been strange to settle in with movies set in contemporary times and places and see how little the COVID-19 pandemic weighs on them. The fantasy of film fiction has rarely felt … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2022 — Number Nine
In her summary piece on this year’s Sundance Film Festival, The New York Times‘s Manohla Dargis lauded the documentary line-up, noting a greater consistency of quality this year and most years, also allowing that the films “were more intellectually engaging … Continue reading Sundance 2023 — Part 3
D. Smith’s documentary Kokomo City flouts all sorts of rules of nonfiction filmmaking. The primary mission of the film is to point the lens at several different Black trans women who make their living as sex workers and allow them … Continue reading Sundance 2023 — Part 2
My most reliable of reliable sources on the ground in Park City, Utah reports that the first in-person staging of the Sundance Film Festival since 2020 was a full return to the halcyon days of old in at least one … Continue reading Sundance 2023 — Part 1
In Fire of Love, director Sara Dosa traces the collaborative career of Katia and Maurice Krafft, who gained renown in the nineteen-seventies and nineteen-eighties for their daring pursuit of volcanic eruptions. The married couple exhaustively filmed and photographed their exploits, … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2022 — Number Ten
