Don’t forget to leave Milk and cookies out for Santa, because after a long night of delivering presents, he could surely use both a snack and an Oscar-winning biopic of a pioneering politician. I wrote this review upon the release … Continue reading From the Archive — Milk
Alfonso Cuarón is almost peerless in his visual craftsmanship. The accuracy of that observation is only enhanced by his prolonged absences from the screen. (He has delivered only two films in the past ten years.) Watching a Cuarón film invited … Continue reading Now Playing — Roma
It’s been twenty years since Deborah Davis’s screenplay for the film that would become The Favourite first made the rounds. Of course, that was well before director Yorgos Lanthimos got his sharpened, toxin-tipped talons into it. The particulars of the … Continue reading Now Playing — The Favourite
The Landlord (Hal Ashby, 1970). The feature directorial debut from Hal Ashby stars Beau Bridges as Elgar Enders, a young man from a wealth family who buys an apartment building in a poverty-stricken Brooklyn neighborhood. His initial plans involves kicking … Continue reading Playing Catch-Up — The Landlord; Annihilation; The Death of Stalin
I thought about dusting this review off a couple months back, during a weekend when a certain feature starring Tom Hardy became an unlikely smash hit. But then I realized the word “Venom” doesn’t appear anywhere in the few hundred … Continue reading From the Archive — Spider-Man 3
Diary of a Country Priest (Robert Bresson, 1951). A feat of cinematic austerity, this French drama follows a youthful man of the cloth (Claude Laydu) as he struggles presiding over a rural parish populated by congregants who dismiss him or … Continue reading Playing Catch-Up — Diary of a Country Priest; Pacific Rim: Uprising; The Rider
Burning begins as a young man name Jongsu (Ah-in Yoo) makes his way through a busy Seoul street. Outside of one of the storefronts, two women are hyping the business to the crowd, and one of them, Haemi (Jong-seo Jun), … Continue reading Now Playing — Burning
Z for Zachariah (Craig Zobel, 2015). Based on a Robert C. O’Brien science fiction novel published in the nineteen-seventies, Z for Zachariah takes a somber approach to post-apocalyptic storytelling. Ann Burden (Margot Robbie) is living alone on a farm, maintaining … Continue reading Playing Catch-Up — Z for Zachariah; These Wilder Years; The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
There were many reasons to celebrate Creed, led by Michael B. Jordan’s exemplary performance as second generation professional boxer Adonis Johnson, who would eventually overcome emotional-fueled reluctance claim the name of his departed father. The other aspect of the film … Continue reading Now Playing — Creed II
A fantastic article published this week addressed the dilemma that is Lena Dunham. A heralded new voice when her HBO show Girls premiered, Dunham has become one of those creators whose public persona inevitably — and, for many, damagingly — … Continue reading From the Archive — Tiny Furniture
