Review: Detour, 2017, dir. Christopher Smith

I reviewed Christopher Smith’s Black Death on this very site six years ago, and so it was something of a pleasure to review his latest, Detour, even if I’m still murky on whether or not I think Detour is good. I liked it. I liked the film’s central gimmick, in which two narratives unfold representing the consequences of … Continue reading →

Paste’s 100 Best Film Noirs Of All Time

“Since its coining in 1946 by French critic Nino Frank, who observed from afar something dark, quite literally, going on at the American cinema, the term “film noir” has been debated and debated and debated some more. Is it a genre? A subgenre? A movement? A trend? A commentary? A style? For the purposes of … Continue reading →

The Criterion Files: Le Doulos/Shoot the Piano Player

We’re back with another installment of The Criterion Files– this time with a double feature of the French persuasion. Three entries and six films in, this is still the first File to touch on the many numerous and great French filmmakers championed by the Criterion collection (and, as an aside, French films do seem to … Continue reading →

The Criterion Files: Drunken Angel/The Naked City

Welcome to the first entry in what I intend to fashion into a weekly series. As the name suggests, the focus here is Criterion Collection films, the classics and masterpieces and unequivocal essentials that hold sway in cinematic canon. My goal? Grab two random entries from off of my shelf, or stream them through Netflix … Continue reading →

Review: Winter’s Bone, 2010, dir. Debra Granik

There’s an argument out there somewhere stating that in the last ten years, film noir has enjoyed something of a revival with the release of films like Memento, Oldboy, and most notably Brick, and maybe there’s some validity to that claim. But film noir as a genre never died out; it just lost a lot … Continue reading →

The Cinematic Decade: My Top 25 of the 2000s (pt. 2)

This installment: Entries 20-16. Starting with: 20. Persepolis:  Visually sumptuous in the face of its stripped-down aesthetic, Persepolis is the autobiographical tale of Marjane Satrapi’s life growing  up in Iran and coming of age in the late 1970s. Told with a soft, elegant cell animated style, the film follows Marjane from her happy childhood spent … Continue reading →