With an opening that evokes a somehow unproblematic Quentin Tarantino or more humble Edgar Wright, writer/director Sasie Sealy’s Lucky Grandma is immediately “on.” Quiet visual cues shout character qualities like a megaphone pressed to an eardrum. With her slouched posture and cigarette always seemingly about to leap to its death from the corner of her […]
In the “before times,” people would actually leave their homes to purchase things. Allegedly, some of them even liked it when they had to interact with other humans in the same remote vicinity. Two recent documentaries—three if you count The Booksellers, which you should, don’t be rude—serve as quaint little time capsules of an era […]
At its core, Extraction is a love story about knives that long to be inside people’s faces and bullets that only want to marry people’s intestines. It’s the kind of action movie where everyone’s first reaction to seeing it is “This is somehow more violent than I expected.” That’s really saying something, because violence was […]
Quentin Dupieux, the filmmaker behind the 2010 cult-classic Rubber—a horror movie about a killer tire that your weird friend keeps trying to get you to watch—is back in the saddle with Deerskin. Hot tip: The film is available to stream early, with some proceeds going to Film Streams. Deerskin was originally intended to play in […]
For everyone who has so much scanned a headline about the brutality routinely inflicted upon the Trans community, the first 30 seconds of The Garden Left Behind will plummet stomachs. “Oh no!” I mumbled, using words more colorful than “Oh no!” Between its wordless, atmospheric opening—one that feels like the precise moment a fish realizes […]
Sex, violence, and groundbreaking cinematography are among the many, many things that The Booksellers is not selling. Sorry, but they just sell books. It’s right there in the title. Actually, because this is a documentary “exposing” the decidedly un-seedy underbelly of New York rare book collectors, purveyors, and auctioneers, it isn’t even really selling you […]
The Mount Rushmore of film criticism is arguably a quasi-Cerberus. The three heads would be Roger Ebert, Gene Siskel, and Pauline Kael. Her chiseled dome should be much bigger, as the two thumby fellas didn’t invent modern film criticism, so much as they simply helped popularize it. Kael made the game, they just played it. […]
In the nicest possible way, Saint Frances is a Lifetime TV movie that has a degree in feminist literary theory. If you added about 40 minutes and cast any of the Freaks and Geeks bros as the lead, you’d have yet another Judd Apatow dramedy redeeming manbabies. Luckily, writer and lead actress Kelly O’Sullivan and […]
Like trying to describe a dream to a friend or a game of telephone played by stoners, every synopsis of Bacurau contains elements of truth but is mostly nonsense. That is wholly intentional. Writers/directors Juliano Dornelles and Kleber Mendonça Filho have whipped up a witches’ brew of old cliches and multiple genres that defies easy […]
The true miracle of Road House is that Patrick Swayze is able to spin-kick above his head while wearing pants that come up to his nipples. All hairstyles here are basically crime scene footage of how we once murdered the ozone layer. Every shirt on every character is a billowy fabric stolen from the corpse […]
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