Speaking to a filmmaker for the second time about their work is always a strange-ish experience, one that I lived through earlier this year with Trey Edward Shults, but I’m not really going to complain about getting to chat up artists like Shults and Sean Baker twice. You might remember that I talked to Baker back … Continue reading
Movie Mezzanine, one of my long-time outlets (if you count two years, give or take, as a long time on any quantifiable scale), underwent a makeover in 2016, and I’m happy to share my first contribution to the site in all of its new and shiny glory: an essay about the Catholic Church sex scandal on … Continue reading
“Imagine the unimaginable: One moment you’re out enjoying a beautiful, sunny day with your friends and your sisters, and the next, your grandmother is slapping you silly for having inappropriate contact with boys. Everything else snowballs from there: You’re whisked off to the doctor for a virginity test, your personal possessions are shut up in … Continue reading
“For aficionados of brutal genre films, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant has enough to keep you satisfied. Find scenes of bravura violence photographed by an eminent cinematographer (the great Emmanuel Lubezki). Find the vague impression of deep, abiding meaning. Find bear-mauling, equine disembowelment. Find rape, castration, graphic suffering. Find additional suffering. Find more suffering. And … Continue reading
“The word “infidelity” likely conjures very specific images in the minds of most; a young couple entangled in a forbidden tryst, lonesome spouses finding succor in the arms of another person, egotists two-timing their partners in hotels for the sheer thrill of it. But we’re just as capable of emotional betrayals as carnal liaisons, of … Continue reading
“‘Looks can be deceiving,’ says Michael Madsen to Kurt Russell upon first introduction in The Hateful Eight. No four words could be more appropriate to the moment, or to the movie: Russell’s character, a bounty hunter named John Wayne Ruth, is distrusting by nature, even more so because he has a prisoner named Daisy Domergue … Continue reading
“Last year, animation distributor GKIDS managed to score two nominations in the AMPAS’ Best Animated Feature Film category: Tom Moore’s Song of the Sea and Isao Takahata’s The Tale of Princess Kaguya. By contrast, their 2015 slate looks less prestigious, with two mixed bags in Extraordinary Tales andKahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, plus the good but … Continue reading
“In the Heart of the Sea is a movie with an identity problem. It’s also a movie with an acting problem, a staging problem, a plot problem, a handful of FX problems and a narrative framework problem. Did Ron Howard learn nothing from Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby? Apparently, the takeaway from that film is … Continue reading
“Just in time for the holidays, here’s a slice of existential parental terror: The World of Kanako, Japanese filmmaker Tetsuya Nakashima’s follow-up to his 2010 film, Confessions. That picture made the AMPAS shortlist for Best Foreign Language Film back in 2011. By contrast, it’s hard to imagine the pundits who comprise the Academy’s voting body … Continue reading
“America is having a renewed—but frankly disappointing—dialogue on the subject of immigration in 2015. Our great country doesn’t exactly have a pristine record when it comes to welcoming émigrés, of course, and so the undercurrent of angry paranoia voiced in that dialogue is neither new, nor especially surprising. It is, however, counterintuitive: The U.S. is … Continue reading
“Occasionally, fate and movie release schedules collude with one another to drop a fresh title on audiences at exactly the right moment. That’s more or less the case with Mediterranea, the feature debut of short filmmaker Jonas Carpignano: Check his picture against the United States’ dialogue on immigration, and you may feel the unnerving sense … Continue reading
“There’s an alternate timeline in which Creed is a superfluous waste of nostalgia. In that universe, Warner Bros. gave the reins to a filmmaker other than Ryan Coogler, the young Oakland-born director who stunned viewers in 2013 with Fruitvale Station, a bio-drama about the death of Oscar Grant. Maybe Coogler is the last person anyone … Continue reading
“When Pixar first arrived with 1995’s Toy Story, they fell into a steady release routine and reliably output a movie every one to three years. 2006 began the eight-year streak in which the animation giant dropped a new title every summer, all the way up to 2013’s Monsters University, which came out amid peak Pixar … Continue reading
“Patricia Riggen’s The 33 ends appropriately with a seaside reunion between its cast’s real-life counterparts: The cadre of Chilean miners who lived buried beneath a mountain for 69 days in the 2010 Copiapó mining calamity. One by one, Riggen introduces her audience to these men in a beautifully lit scene that pays homage to the … Continue reading
“If you’re the type of person who avoids setting foot in a forest, you’ll probably feel validated byThe Hallow, the debut from Irish filmmaker Corin Hardy. This is a horror film that treats the natural world as a source of mortal danger. Here there be monsters, yet Hardy’s macabre aesthetic lends even an undisturbed bosk … Continue reading
“And now, for your edutainment: 2015’s second movie about Apple visionary and all-around jerk, Steve Jobs, creatively titled Steve Jobs for sake of ease. The film marks Danny Boyle as the second person in 2015 to attempt at parsing out the many faces of the late Jobs, or maybe the third. Boyle has the director’s … Continue reading
“Bostonians tend toward insularity that often comes off like rudeness. In truth, that stereotypical coarseness is a blend of honesty and austerity: They favor candor over sensitivity, and act like total introverts in the interest of honoring their neighbors’ privacy. Tom McCarthy’s latest film,Spotlight, appreciates that social shuttering better, perhaps, than it appreciates its subject … Continue reading
“It’s only October and Room, the latest film from Irish director Lenny Abrahamson, is already the subject of much Oscar buzzing and hyping. If the chatter feels premature, it’s only because of the film’s recent win at the Toronto International Film Festival, where TIFF-goers bestowed it with the coveted People’s Choice Award; six out of … Continue reading
“Crystal Moselle’s The Wolfpack sounds like the stuff of fiction on paper, but, of course, the film is drawn from real life. The doc tells the story of the Angulo clan, a family living in a Lower East Side apartment in New York City, though “living” doesn’t quite describe their delimited existence. The Angulo children … Continue reading
“Extraordinary Tales, a seasonal piece of spookery by Raul Garcia, means well but haunts only half-heartedly. The film is a meta-monument to the works of Boston-born, Baltimore-dead Gothic-Romantic wunderkind Edgar Allan Poe, chiefly his short stories but with a side helping of poems: “Annabel Lee” and “A Dream Within a Dream” start us off alongside … Continue reading
A Constant Visual Feast 