Note: Major spoiler in paragraph three. It’s easy to tell that Lee Isaac Chung—director of the modest, exceptional Arkansas drama Minari—wants to make a earnest paean to middle America and its folk culture while integrating the inexorable blemish of capital and technology on that culture, both popularizing
My story with Amadeus began, as I'm sure it often does, with my grandfather. My grandpa always liked movies, but demonstrated a particular inclination following my grandma's death: he would invite me over to watch classics like The Godfather and Gladiator or catch new releases that
There's one major spoiler here in the final paragraph. This one's for the cinephiles. The lovers of film. The celluloid obsessed. And MaXXXine couldn't be worse for it. A smug, satisfied, self-proclaimed "B-movie with A-ideas", MAXXXine is the nadir of Ti West&
Decent. Airless, but decent. Fails to recapture the regional magic of Jeff Nichols's great 2011-2012 masterpieces Take Shelter and Mud, films that sing with urgency and specificity and quite a bit to say about the narratives white Americans follow to gain a sense of footing in a fast-changing
Well, awesome, first of all. Total fucking gongshow creativity and ingenuity here, it's such a thrill to be back in the hands of the maestro after nearly a decade. My relationship to movies--and my orientation toward the world into which movies are birthed--has changed a lot in those
Foreword: My list has been set for months, but I couldn’t resist the urge to tinker with it obsessively until I realized, shit, we are just about to enter the sixth calendar month of the next year. Anyway, here it is. Fashionably late is better than never. There will
Good, but frustratingly close to being really good and occasionally great which makes the fact that it is merely good all the more disappointing. Schoenbrun has a vision, and commands exceptional control of color in their frames. They have big ideas, and a clear affection for the forgotten (and lost,
Spoilers below I'll never forget the feeling of total overwhelming awe that crashed into me upon the conclusion of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, the feeling I chase with just about every movie I ever watch and rarely experience. It wasn't just me, either:
TASHI: What am I? PATRICK: In reality? A really, really, insanely hot woman. - Challengers “Did you ever think there’s more to life than being really, really, really ridiculously good looking?” - Zoolander No Bones & All, with its tearful elegy for a Midwest sunken in sand—Guadagnino’s
Major spoiler at the end of this, FWIW. Moronic, phony Call of Duty knockoff suffused with neoliberal guilt. Insofar as it is successful at anything, it is as a corny allegory for the insufficiency of media to capture the zeitgeist or to animate positive action. Which, okay, are we making
Past Lives is last year's anointed Sundance Darling, and it's a category to which I am not entirely allergic. Beasts of the Southern Wild, Whiplash, and Minari are all films I love. But for every victory there's a maudlin and sycophantic movie that inexplicably
David Ayer initially caught my attention at the age of 12 upon a screening of Street Kings with my grandpa. I was really into violence at the time, but Ayer mostly dropped off the map for me until Suicide Squad, which continues to hold the distinction of worst hatchet job