Grossing $23 million worldwide and receiving mixed reviews at the time of its release, this is the type of movie that just seemed to be born as an immediate cult classic, as it’s one of those idiosyncratic efforts that can’t really be compared to too much else. Though intentionally or not, it did seem to…
I can vividly remember the opening night for Wag the Dog. It was back in 1997, I was in high school becoming a budding film lover, and I went with a group of friends to see this bitter black comedy about Hollywood and politics and I can remember being one of the few people in…
You would have to be mostly dead inside to not have a nearly immediate emotional reaction to Garth Davis’ stunning true life story Lion. I was a personal disaster all throughout this film; it hit me with blunt-force impact and I can’t stop thinking about the film and its message and how life throws insane…
Cherry 2000 is a fantastic cinematic explosion of ideas, genres, tones, and possibilities. In other words – it’s a Steve De Jarnatt picture, ahead of its time during initial release, and so ready for rediscovery by modern audiences it’s almost a joke. Feeling like an acid-tinged riff on the post-apocalyptic action narrative with shades of…
Mel Gibson’s unsurprisingly savage WWII film Hacksaw Ridge delivers the fiery-action goods. I was definitely impressed by the wild stunt work and some of the individual bits of action, and it’s truly lunatic/nuts of conscientious objector Desmond Doss to have done what he did in real life. The religious angle, thankfully, isn’t hit too hard…
Starring Anthony Edwards and Mare Winningham as two potential love birds whose romantic date-night is cut short thanks to the alarming notification of the end of the world (nukes have been launched…!), De Jarnatt’s exciting, heartfelt, and totally unique tale of desperate romance hits all the right notes of 80’s tonal shifts and scrappy whimsy….
I was a big fan of writer/director Rian Johnson’s debut film, Brick; his follow up, The Brothers Bloom, was a bit too precious but still demonstrated tons of style and cinematic quirk. But Looper is a heady and stylish mélange of science fiction and noir with some bloody shoot-outs, numerous narrative twists and turns, and…
Last year, people kept saying stuff like “Paul Verhoeven is BACK with Elle!,” and yes, true, he had a new movie get released last year, and it is in fact a brilliant piece of work on multiple levels, but I’d argue that he never WENT anywhere in the first place. Hollywood simply became uninterested in…
Sightseers is most likely my favorite film from Ben Wheatley so far, and that says a lot, as I’ve enjoyed all of his work. For some reason, I just can’t stop revisiting this movie; there’s something uniquely deranged about it that speaks to me and my love for satirical black comedy. However, you should only…
The Edge of Seventeen is a funny if overly familiar story of a female high school student learning to adjust to her surroundings and hormones and the changing attitudes of the people around her. Hailee Steinfeld is unsurprisingly confident as the lead character, but for me, the real discovery of the movie was Haley Lu…
Get Out is a cool, entertaining movie. I had heard a deafening chorus of hype before walking into the theater (99% at Rottentomates; $135 million in 24 days), so my expectations were very high. Writer/director Jordan Peele has crafted a nifty and witty low-budget social satire masquerading as an occasionally violent psychological thriller; comparisons to…
A film that strips away any narrative pretense and bloat, favoring classical and exquisitely shot and cut fight sequences with a terse screenplay (written by Soderbergh frenemy Lem Dobbs) that only divulges exactly what you need to know and nothing more. Gina Carano, a former MMA star, isn’t a particularly expressive or emotive screen presence,…
I very much enjoyed last year’s much-derided thriller The Girl on the Train. It’s not the best movie I’ve ever seen, and it’s hardly the worst. I like a good, steamy, erotic thriller, the types of movies that used to be original screenplay spec sales back in the 90’s. But nowadays, these genre thrillers are…
Gus Van Sant’s “death trilogy” started in 2002 with the unique and intimate film, Gerry, kicking off a run of small, super low budget and very internalized pieces of work, which also included 2003’s Elephant and Last Days in 2005 (while similar, 2007’s Paranoid Park isn’t considered part of this unofficial grouping). Certainly not for…
Spike Lee has always been a very politically and socially conscious filmmaker, with much of his work touching on topical elements that link us all together as human beings. This makes his straight-up genre picture, Inside Man, all the more atypical, as it’s one of the few gun-for-hire pictures that he’s put his name…
Totally buried by Paramount Vantage at the end of 2012, David Chase’s Not Fade Away is a funny and nostalgic time portal back to the 60’s, with a fantastic soundtrack, and a killer supporting performance from James Gandolfini. While the film possibly feels incomplete (I really would love to see a miniseries that picks…
