Add The Night is Short, Walk On Girl to the canon of “great drinking movies.” The characters here drink more liquor than any mortal human could possibly imbibe without dying, much less without blacking out; they also have better adventures than most of us do when under the influence, though most of us don’t do the … Continue reading
Rachel Dretzin probably didn’t make Far From the Tree anticipating that members of her audience might come back around to Donald Trump mocking a disabled reporter at a campaign rally in 2015 (nice voting, schmucks!). Speaking for myself, that’s exactly what I kept thinking of watching the film (which is based on Andrew Solomon’s non-fiction novel … Continue reading
Welp, A24 isn’t really doing much to promote Augustine Frizzell’s excellent Never Goin’ Back, so I guess it’s up to me, a critic, to champion this gross, tender, raunchy, outrageous, sweet-hearted, and absolutely hilarious film. (It’s one of my favorites of the year. And one of the best I saw at this year’s Independent Film Festival … Continue reading
If you thought The First Murder was good, and if you liked The Second Murder, too, wait until you get a load of The Third Murder! Okay: Sorry. I’ve already made this joke on Twitter. It wasn’t funny then (lies! It was hilarious), and it isn’t funny now (see last parenthetical, asshole). But I couldn’t help myself. Talking about … Continue reading
“Hey,” says the movie, “let’s all go back in time to our adolescence, when our skin resembled pizza bathed in grease and battered with a meat hammer, and everything we liked actually in retrospect really, really sucks, and social interaction felt as risky as giving yourself a half dozen paper cuts and sticking your limbs … Continue reading
Fourth verse, same as the first, a little bit better, but it couldn’t be worse. Okay, okay. Fine. I’ll stop ragging on The Purge, the first movie in the Purge franchise, and start praising The First Purge, the fourth movie in the Purge franchise, even though The First Purge lags behind The Purge: Anarchy and The Purge: Election Year. Parts of The First Purge … Continue reading
I’m in a semi-depressive funk on my birthday, so I’m going to force my way through by thinking of The Year of Spectacular Men, a delightful gem of a film where the Deutch family – Madelyn, Zoey, and Lea* – assemble like the Avengers and make us cackle at rom-com done well. 2018 is Zoey’s year: … Continue reading
For clarity’s sake, all of the things I say about Brett Haley in the intro to my review of his latest, Hearts Beat Loud, is absolutely true: I’ve never spoken to him one on one, but I have seen him speak, twice, two years in a row, at Independent Film Festival Boston, where in both appearances he … Continue reading
Days after my review of Bart Layton’s American Animals published at Paste Magazine, I’m starting to wonder if I had problems with the film based on what I thought it should be rather than what it actually is. Yeah, yeah: Sounds like a bunch of hand-wringing movie critic anxiety over nothing. American Animals tells the story of four … Continue reading
Don’t ask me why the header image for this review is so small. Instead, ask me why it took planet Earth so long to make a documentary about the life of eminently fascinating human being André Leon Talley, who I was first introduced to during the period of my life where I watched America’s Next Top Model. … Continue reading
I remember dealing with a lot of bullshit and nonsense growing up as a child, from emotional growing pains to literal growing pains, but at least I didn’t have to live with the specter of AIDS hanging over me, which the protagonist of Carla Simón’s superb feature debut, Summer 1993, does. The film is startlingly lovely considering … Continue reading
I’m wondering if Michael Pearce’s very good Beast is dropping at an inopportune cultural moment; we’re talking a lot about why kids shoot up schools, and there’s a percentage of nimrods trotting out usual excuses like “they were bullied” and “they watch too much violent media.” Beast isn’t quite about either of those, and it’s not about … Continue reading
For a movie with such a cheery, upbeat title, Let the Sunshine In is determinedly melancholic. Check the director’s name and that makes sense: Claire Denis doesn’t really make straightforwardly upbeat movies, from Trouble Every Day to White Material, so naturally she’d make a romantic comedy dripping in sadness. But it’s a good kind of sadness founded on a real … Continue reading
In the words of Michael David Cummings, everybody needs a little vengeance, especially rape victims, and then especially rape victims left for dead in the desert by their married boyfriend and their boyfriends’ friends (one of whom is the rapist). That’s the set-up for Coralie Fargeat’s excellent debut, Revenge, a French genre exercise that’s as gory and … Continue reading
I struggled to put my thoughts about Masaaki Yuasa’s Lu Over the Wall into words, which is really bad, because putting thoughts into words is sort of my thing. It’s not that I don’t like Lu Over the Wall, but rather that Lu Over the Wall is what I imagine your run of the mill psychedelic drug trip looks like … Continue reading
There are times, many in fact, when I sit back, look at what I’ve accomplished in my years coming up in the culture writing biz, and think to myself, “Yeah. That’s pretty good.” (Okay: “Many” is putting it strongly. I do not routinely bask in my own output. It happens only as often as Donald … Continue reading
…so, I probably should have shared this review ahead of this year’s IFFBoston run, because while the review is out of Tribeca, the movie happens to have also played on Thursday night at IFFB. And it’s a pretty good movie. I allude to two other non-traditional docs built on recreation and reenactment, Kate Plays Christine and Nuts!, in my review, but I … Continue reading
Nothing like watching a weird-ass movie adaptation of one of your favorite books that is nigh-unrecognizable from the book, am I right? I doubt Serge Bozon wants me to be mad about Mrs. Hyde; I doubt he made the movie expecting it’d actually make anyone mad. Without a doubt, though, I can say that the movie did … Continue reading
