Back in 2012 writer-director Benh Zeitlin made his feature film debut with Beasts of the Southern Wild, a fiercely fresh fairy tale set in a flood-ravaged, postapocalyptic world inspired by the lingering ghosts of Hurricane Katrina. Eight years later Zeitlin returns, delivering another dirt poor Deep South fantasia with the...
Celebrated British director Michael Winterbottom (Welcome to Sarajevo, The Claim, 24 Hour Party People) reunites with noted British comedian Steve Coogan (Alan Partridge, Around the World in 80 Days, Hamlet 2) for another bitingly witty outing. After their work together in the indelible comedies Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull...
We already live in a country heavily divided by politics and culture. Worldwide, economic inequities have lead to a fracturing of society that often pits the increasingly fewer “haves” against the increasingly greater “have-nots.” Life, these days, is tough. So why would Hollywood ask us to endure something like Impractical...
Buried somewhere deep inside The Assistant, documentary filmmaker Kitty Green’s first scripted feature (after 2013’s Ukraine Is Not a Brothel and 2017 Casting JonBenet), is a combustible, angry feminist screed for the #MeToo era clamoring to get out. Unfortunately, it’s cloaked inside a spare, observational, fly-on-the-wall drama so bogged down...
Swedish director Ruben Östlund’s 2014 film Force Majeure produced some noticeable ripples in the international art film realm thanks to its icy examination of love and marriage. Existing somewhere between the banal horrors of Michael Haneke (Caché, Funny Games, The Piano Teacher) and the detached decay of Bergman’s Scenes From...
Hollywood has gotten pretty handy at making bad horror movies. This past year gave us the likes of Escape Room, Annabelle Comes Home, Happy Death Day 2U, Scary Stories to Tell In the Dark, The Curse of La Llorona, 47 Meters Down: Uncaged, Pet Sematary, Crawl and Black Christmas—all cheesy,...
French-Canadian filmmaker François Girard knows a thing or two about the intersection of movies and classical music, having directed Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (1993), Yo-Yo Ma Inspired by Bach (1997) and The Red Violin (1998). His latest, The Song of Names, throws a bit of religion into...
British author Hugh Lofting’s juvenile fantasy series Doctor Dolittle, first published in 1920, isn’t quite as popular as it once was among the kiddy set. The author’s rather quaint works are best known these days for inspiring the 1967 Rex Harrison musical about a doctor who could “walk with the...
It is easy to forget that not everyone who lives in a totalitarian regime likes their totalitarian regime. It’s not mass hysteria that takes over the people’s minds in a place overrun by despots and theocracies. People of conscience still retain their values and morals independent of social pressures. How...
Comparisons of Jennifer Reeder’s ’80s-flavored coming-of-age thriller Knives and Skin to Lynchian cult classic “Twin Peaks”—as well as to the work of auteurs like Gregg Araki and Yorgos Lanthimos—are well earned. Drawing on an essential narrative and stylistic conventions similar to those in David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks”—the seismic impact that...
