“‘How to Build a Girl’ Betrays Its Blueprints”

How to build a girl? Start with a good script. Continue reading →

Review: Eighth Grade, 2018, dir. Bo Burnham

“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 →

Review: Burning Sands, 2017, dir. Gerard McMurray

It’s a thing in the entertainment biz that if a movie about subject A is released into the pop cultural wilds, inevitably another movie about the same subject will be released shortly thereafter. To wit: Andrew Neel’s Goat opened in theaters last September, detailing the intimate particulars of fraternity hazing rituals and rites of initiation. It’s … Continue reading →

Review: My Golden Days, 2016, dir. Arnaud Desplechin

Oh, memory is a hazy, funny thing. Time spent in our reveries can take us from point A to point G across the span of our lives, and even if it doesn’t make any kind of external sense, it makes total internal sense. That’s sort of how Arnaud Desplechin’s new film, My Golden Days, operates. It … Continue reading →