“Our Man in Tehran”
“It’s not a movie, people’s lives were really in danger!” With those words, Our Man in Tehran tips its hand at the outset, firmly positioning itself as a rebuttal to the most recent Hollywood...
View Article“Shake the Dust”
We’ve come a long way from the b-boying, beatboxing, freestyle origins of hip hop in the South Bronx. Modern conceptions of hip hop favor 99 Problems over Fight(ing) the Power or Fuck(ing) tha Police....
View Article“Madame Bovary”
Emma Bovary is famously recognized as one of literature’s least sympathetic heroines. Entitled and selfish, her only driving motivation is an unquenchable hunger for material wealth and passionate...
View Article“Manglehorn”
Specialness has always had a vaulted place in the movies. It’s a classic hero’s journey: the discovery that you are destined for greatness or, in the case of epic love stories, the quest for “the one.”...
View Article“Do I Sound Gay?”
It’s certainly been an incredible week for LGBT rights in the United States. With the June 26th ruling of Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court declared that it was a nationwide constitutional right...
View Article“People Places Things” Is Unmemorable, Uninteresting, and Unamusing
For how unmemorable and uninteresting it is, writer/director James Strouse’s People Places Things may well have been called “Noun.” Having premiered at Sundance with little fanfare, likely amid a...
View Article“Blind” Is A Sharp, Pleasant Surprise
On paper, the premise of Blind is unassailably bleak: the recently blind Ingrid (Ellen Dorrit Petersen), having permanently lost her vision to an incurable genetic disease, confines herself to her...
View ArticleThe Single-Take “Victoria” Is A Singular Achievement
It’s a sorry state of affairs when a foreign film’s best recourse to cut through the cacophonous blare of new releases in a given week is to highlight its central gimmick, as Victoria’s tagline boasts:...
View ArticleShow Your Work: On “Experimenter”
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” – Søren Kierkegaard Undoubtedly, Kierkegaard had loftier goals in mind when he penned this observation, but it does neatly...
View Article“Love” Is Basically “Annie Hall” With Money Shots
Some time ago, I lived next door to a couple who, by all accounts, were terrible for each other. I’d lie awake at night, listening through the paper-thin walls to their galvanic arguments, usually set...
View Article“Don Verdean” May Only Appeal to Hardcore Jared Hess Fans
Early last month, a YouTube video featuring Pastor Kevin Swanson as he delivered a speech before the National Religious Liberties Conference became viral. An animated Swanson answers the question of...
View ArticleThis Week’s Cinema: “Moonwalkers” and “Band of Robbers”
Traditionally, January is a time of casting off the old and ringing in the new. It’s a time to make a fresh start full of hope for the future. Not so much for the movies. In terms of the release cycle,...
View ArticleThis Week’s Cinema: On Noam Chomsky and Yitzhak Rabin
In reflecting on the week’s theatrical offerings, it’s not a surprise that thoughts drifted to Donald Trump’s increasingly ludicrous presidential run. Of course, “ludicrous” is too gentle a word to...
View ArticleNow Playing: “Nina Forever”, “Where to Invade Next”, and “Standoff”
Somewhere among the studio-backed cacophony of Deadpool’s obnoxiously self-aware in-your-face ad campaign (which, mercifully, will die down after this weekend) are a handful of smaller releases...
View ArticleNow Playing: “Backtrack” and “Marguerite & Julien”
T’was the week before Oscar night / When all through the multi-plex / Nothing much was premiering / Save for bad horror and weird sex Bad Horror Peter Bower sees dead people. Or rather, they see him....
View ArticleNow Playing: “Boom Bust Boom” and “City of Gold”
Documentary films all too often get a pass if the subject matter is of social or political significance, or if it fits into one of the following crowd-pleasing categories: rockumentaries, environmental...
View ArticleNow Playing: “Born to Be Blue”
In an interview for the Village Voice following the premiere of Born to Be Blue at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, Ethan Hawke thoughtfully voiced one of the central tensions driving...
View ArticleNow Playing: “The Invitation” and “Neon Bull”
There are few cultural customs with more built-in tension than dinner parties. Often an excuse to mix disparate friend groups, invitees make stilted small talk over a few too many drinks. What should...
View ArticleNow Playing: “Holidays” and “Tale of Tales”
Anthologies are tricky. By their very nature, they are replete with problems to overcome. Mashing a series of short films up into a single entity is difficult to wrangle into a unified whole, unless a...
View ArticleNow Playing: “Mad Tiger” and “Elstree 1976”
It’s an odd coincidence that, in picking a pair of movies to cover this week, I hit upon two documentaries that are ostensibly flip-sides of the same theme. They’re both stories about larger-than-life...
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