Movie Review
‘Chained for Life’ is a Masterful Dissection of How the Film Industry Treats Disability [Fantasia Film Festival]
August 8, 2018“Blindness is an illness, but it’s also a metaphor,” explains the actress Mabel (Jess Weixler) in an interview with a skeptical journalist. She’s talking about her role as a blind woman in a sordid arthouse horror film set in a hospital for the disfigured and genetically abnormal. As she, a sight-seeing woman, defends her choice […]
Read More
‘Tokyo Vampire Hotel’ Review: Bizarre, Bloodsucking Battle Royale Would Make ‘Blade’ Blush [Fantasia Film Festival]
August 8, 2018Tokyo Vampire Hotel is a 142-minute bloodsucker royal rumble – cut down from roughly 390 minutes of Amazon’s original Japanese series – almost entirely located inside an almighty princess’ “nether region.” Are you tuning out after that sentence? Don’t. Writer and director Sion Sono’s (kinda) got this. The man behind Why Don’t You Play In […]
Read More
‘BlacKkKlansman’ Review: Spike Lee’s Latest is Outrageous, Necessary, and a Bit Clumsy
August 8, 2018What do you do when you’re a Black person trying to infiltrate the local chapter of the KKK? If you’re a Black person being asked this question, your immediate response should be “no thanks,” for obvious reasons. But if you spend the time thinking through the frankly ridiculous ask for the sake of the exercise, […]
Read More
‘Night Comes On’ is an Oddly Touching Revenge Movie Built on Two of the Year’s Best Performances
August 8, 2018Angel 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 […]
Read More
‘Tigers Are Not Afraid’ is One of 2018’s Best Undistributed Films and a Journey Worth Every Tear You’ll Shed [Fantasia Film Festival]
August 8, 2018How 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 […]
Read More
‘Buffalo Boys’ is a Wild Shotgun Blast of Exciting Action and Overly Familiar Story Beats [Fantasia Film Festival]
August 8, 2018Mike 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 […]
Read More
‘Pledge’ Review: A Lean, Mean Fraternity Murder Convenes in Daniel Robbins’ Thriller [Fantasia Film Festival]
August 8, 2018As 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 […]
Read More
‘Madeline’s Madeline’ is an Incredible, Painful Journey Through the Artistic Process and One of the Best Movies of the Year [Fantasia Film Festival]
August 8, 2018“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 […]
Read More
‘Christopher Robin’ Review: A Captivating Blend of Whimsy and Melancholy
August 8, 2018When 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, […]
Read More
‘Deadpool 2’ Review: A Smug Sequel That’s Just as Obnoxious as The Original
June 4, 2018Much 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 […]
Read More
‘Solo: A Star Wars Story’ is Uneven and Messy and a Whole Bunch of Fun
June 4, 2018There 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 […]
Read More
‘Solo: A Star Wars Story’ Review: A Highly Entertaining Adventure That’s Not Really About Anything
June 4, 2018After 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 […]
Read More