Private Life is the funniest film I have seen so far in 2018. This painfully hilarious new movie, which just debuted on Netflix, is the work of writer/director Tamara Jenkins (1998’s The Slums of Beverly Hills, 2007’s The Savages), and it’s an absolute crime for cinema lovers that it takes this long for her to…
Leave No Trace is a remarkable motion picture and I wasn’t prepared for its cumulative emotional power, especially during the shattering final act. Theatrically released earlier this summer and now available on Blu-ray/DVD and via various streaming providers, co-writer and director Debra Granik (Down to the Bone, Winter’s Bone) has crafted a beautifully simple and…
Coming off the heels of the Academy darling, La La Land, filmmaker Damien Chazelle has turned into quite the auteur; reteaming with Ryan Gosling (his generation’s Paul Newman), the two forge a very personal and intimate story of not the moon landing, or a film about NASA, or American pride, but a film about Neil…
Netflix has just released their finest original content when it comes to their feature films. Jeremy Saulnier’s Hold the Dark starring Jeffery Wright, Alexander Skarsgard, Riley Keough, and James Badge Dale is a transgressive and pulverizing tale into the heart of darkness. The film plays as if it is an adult fable, a woman whose…
Murphy Martin plays Barnaby. A man who’s sh*t out of luck. Despite small success as a chef he still lives with his parents and after losing his job, he loses his home and his girlfriend to boot. Forced to live inside his car Barnaby just sulks through life until he meets an old high school…
There is magical sense of purity to this film; innocence and wonder. Call Me By Your Name is that film that rarely gets made, and it’s a wonder that it does. Every word, every frame, every movement is delicately crafted that creates a film that is remarkably touching and special. Timothee Chalamet and Armie Hammer…
Coming off of his original and haunting debut film, Ex Machina, Alex Garland parlayed his newfound status and momentum into a visually rich and emotionally charged film headlined by the wonderful Natalie Portman. Annihilation is a film that aims high, shored up by an eclectic and visceral cast, but its plot is so lowkey that…
The Deer Hunter is a film of overwhelming magnitude and staggering directorial force. The first hour is magisterial, giving way to Hell, and then into rocky redemption. Director Michael Cimino was on another level here, while the screenplay (which was written by Deric Washburn from a story by Washburn, Cimino, Louis Garfinkle, and Quinn Redeker)…
What Maisie Knew is one of the most perceptive, honest, and devastating films that I’ve ever seen to involve a young child as its lead protagonist. Onata Aprile’s performance is unexpectedly extraordinary, projecting a sense of maturity well beyond her years (she was six years old at the time of filming), and is nothing less…
Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled is a ravishing film to look at, and I’m not surprised that she won Best Director at Cannes. This is a Cannes movie if there ever was one, and on a production/aesthetic level, it’s one of the richest pieces I’ve seen this year. I’d have to assume that the utterly stunning…
Kelly Reichardt’s films all have the same tone and atmosphere, whether she’s exploring two men walking, talking, and camping (the wonderful and incisive Old Joy), a spiritually lost woman and her beloved dog in rainy Oregon (Wendy & Lucy, still my favorite films of hers), the dangerous and dusty open range (Meek’s Cutoff, brilliant), or…
A portrait of a brilliant artistic mind but infused with something extremely personal and sad, The Secret Life of Lance Letscher is one of the more emotionally piercing studies of the tortured artist that I’ve come across, and is easily one of the most engrossing films I’ve seen so far in 2017. Directed with a…
The charming, offbeat indie Dave Made a Maze is one of those efforts that truly feels hand-made and the product of a filmmaker who had a very specific vision and a very specific way of realizing that vision. Directed by Bill Watterson from a script he co-wrote with Steven Sears, this quirky and unconventional piece…
A Brilliant Monster is a study into the stressful depths of the creative mind, the lengths that one goes through for success, and the anxiety to keep on producing while on top. Is it mental instability? Or the pressures of a society built to reward the selfish? This uber low independent movie takes an abstract…
Wind River is masterful, utterly immaculate filmmaking, almost suffocating in its greatness by the time its powerful conclusion unfolds. Written and directed by the extremely talented storyteller Taylor Sheridan, who in the past few years has scripted the one-two punch of Sicario (for Denis Villeneuve) and Hell or High Water (for David Mackenzie); I’m happy…
While I was scrolling through the various movie channels and setting my weekly recordings, I noticed that on Tuesday at 3am this week, the EPIX HD movie channel is airing the long-lost cult item The Pursuit of D.B. Cooper. Being a child of the 1980’s, there are more than a few under the radar gems…
