“Eye opening” doesn’t even begin to describe my reaction to director Mehrdad Oskouei’s Starless Dreams, a deeply revealing documentary that takes a look inside an all-female, mostly juvenile prison in […]
In an effort to expand on the current wave of female-directed horror breakthroughs—such as Karyn Kusama’s The Invitation, Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Jennifer Kent’s […]
A wonderful trend in the last year of film has been the uncovering of long-forgotten (and sometimes, virtually unknown) stories about ground-breaking achievements that have quite literally changed history. While […]
In many strange ways, the raunchy comedy Fist Fight has a few important messages buried in its brutality, most of which have to do with the decline of the public […]
Admittedly, it sounds like a ridiculous idea on paper. Hell, even when you see it executed on the big screen, you almost can’t believe that somebody came up with the […]
While director Gore Verbinski has true gifts for immersive production design (as he did in the first three Pirates of the Caribbean films) and just generally creeping us out (The […]
Some of the finest directors working today cut their teeth on (and occasionally return to) short films. Look at any Pixar film today, and I promise you whoever directed it, […]
The 1947 novel “Every Man Dies Alone,” by author Hans Fallada, is best known for being one of the first anti-Nazi books published by a German writer after World War […]
The natural inclination after watching the Oscar-nominated, timeless, and slightly surrealistic The Red Turtle is to wonder what centuries-old mythology serves as its source material. In truth, this wordless story […]
It’s true what they say: familiarity breeds contempt. And the more I get to know the characters in the Fifty Shades film, the more I find them stupid and loathsome. […]
During the course of the first John Wick film (released in 2014), writer Derek Kolstad and first-time director Chad Stahelski (a former stunt man and coordinator) hinted at a vast […]
Sitting through the high-energy, brightly colored, million-jokes-per-minute The Lego Batman Movie, I was reminded of a question that I haven’t had the opportunity to ask myself in recent months: Is […]