Angel Lamere, an eighteen-year-old fresh out of juvie, should be at the beach. She grew up dreaming of being by the water; on her mother’s suggestion, cars passing in the night sounded like ocean waves, and we get to experience these sounds alongside her. The beach is the last place she felt safe. It feels […]
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How Issa López’s Tigers Are Not Afraid has played some fourteen film festivals and still doesn’t have distribution outside Mexico is astonishing. Her spectacularly moving childhood journey bursts with Guillermo del Toro parallels, corpse-risen terror and emotional hard-knocks that’ll both singe and chill your core. A snapshot of Mexico’s darkest drug cartel infection told entirely from […]
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Mike Wiluan’s Buffalo Boys is a pulpy, Wild West-inspired revenge thriller by way of Javanese commemoration. As a directorial debut, it’s enjoyable enough when quad-barrel shotguns blast crooked gentrifiers through saloon windows. As a complete “legends are born” horseback – er, buffaloback – adventure, glossy surface-value filmmaking charts plottable highs and lows without much introspection […]
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As a college attendee who never participated in Greek life myself, fraternal thrillers are always something of an outside-looking-in affair. My behind-closed-doors knowledge comes only from friends who recall their “elephant walks” or 24-hour drinking binges, always uttered with an air of unbelievableness. That’s what makes this subgenre so difficult. Can a movie sell sorority […]
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“And soon, mechanically, oppressed by the gloomy day and the prospect of a sad future, I carried to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had let soften a piece of madeleine. But at the very instant when the mouthful of tea mixed with cake-crumbs touched my palate, I quivered, attentive to […]
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When I first saw Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are, I cried through almost the entire film. That said, the mixed reception it received didn’t surprise me. Its intended audience — to my mind, at least — didn’t dovetail with the market it was being sold to; despite being based on a children’s book, […]
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Much like its predecessor, Deadpool 2 is less a movie than a smirky, feature-length meme generator. Though the sequel has a new director and some new cast members, Deadpool 2 is unsurprisingly doubling down on what made the first film such a big hit, including jokes about exactly how big of a hit at the […]
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There will always be something transporting about the music that John Williams has composed for the Star Wars universe. As soon as the old themes and styles of orchestrations (lavish strings, sharp brass) kick in during Ron Howard’s Solo: A Star Wars Story, it’s difficult not to feel a little jolt of excitement — or […]
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After a troubled production, Solo: A Star Wars Story is here. The good news: the behind-the-scenes woes weren’t enough to sink the film and create a mess. The bad news: that doesn’t necessarily mean everything in Solo runs as smoothly as it should. At the center of Solo is a question: what do we want […]
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(This review originally ran during our coverage of the Sundance Film Festival. American Animals is in select theaters today.) Heist movies are all about setting up the illusion of clockwork precision, but every good heist film features at least one scene where the job goes horribly wrong – and the great ones often dive into […]
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Ray Bradbury’s 1953 dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 gets a slick, stylish update for the Trump era courtesy of 99 Homes director Ramin Bahrani. On the surface, taking Bradbury’s book about the suppression of knowledge and setting it firmly in a world that seems to be crafted in the image of Donald Trump makes sense, and […]
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(This review originally ran during our coverage of the SXSW Film Festival. Upgrade is in theaters today.) Leigh Whannell’s latest film Upgrade is one of the most strikingly invigorated sci-fi watches I’ve been awestruck by in quite some time. I’m talking *hard* sci-fi, with callbacks to anything from eXistenZ to The Matrix to Minority Report. […]
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