Comedy · Counterculture · Crime · Historical & Epic · Hollywood · Movies · Westerns
Who are these people? Watching Cliff try to figure it out is painful, because we know the future, but such knowledge is not power. Within its imagined boundaries, Once Upon[…]
Comedy · Costume Drama · Historical & Epic
This gets at the heart of The Favourite, which is one of the most evident trends in anti-sexist filmmaking lately: to be willing to portray women as unadulteratedly evil, as[…]
Comedy · Counterculture · Drama · Sex & Relationships
Concepts of sex and marriage have changed monumentally in the last few decades and still today prove endlessly malleable and undefinable. We spend our whole lives attempting to shape our[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Drama · Essays · Romance
QT’s films are commonly hurtling toward darkness, yet Once Upon feels like a repudiation, as much as a culmination, of his oeuvre. There’s a point in the experience where the[…]
“Lucky Grandma,” says Claire Baiz in her fifth Tribeca dispatch, “features richly layered characters in director Sasie Sealy’s homage to Chinatown that make this universal tale both reassuring and groundbreaking.”[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Pre-Code
“With his impish grin, twinkling eyes, and boyish blond hair, he looks like Tom Sawyer crossed with a Tammany Hall fixer.”
Planes, Trains and Automobiles teaches the other comedies of errors that an error in character is much more significant than an error in judgment. And much more redeemable. * *[…]
Downsizing is a dystopic satire on American values that has an unsurprising and credible core involving a sick and impoverished underclass. It is credible because the USA is alone among[…]
Comedy · Counterculture · Drama
Everyone in Shampoo is id driven, with the audience taking voyeuristic pleasure at the absence of any self-awareness. George is inarticulate and largely passive, more preyed upon than preying with[…]
Living disillusioned in a post-Brexit Instagram-filtered age, standing at the periphery of the job market in a state of horror as the surplus of impressive graduates wander by, it is[…]
Comedy · Directors · Women in Film
American Audiences watched Irma la Douce without discomfort, perhaps because French prostitutes and pimps were performing immoral acts and misdeeds. The same subversion of middle-class values that would later inform[…]
The high-tech and the primitive coexist in The Life Aquatic, much as they do in Keaton’s The Navigator, and as in all of Anderson’s films they combine with the deeply[…]
Comedy · Drama · Festivals & Awards
To Dust (dir. Shawn Snyder) “Isn’t that sweet,” I thought when I picked up my mother’s dropped pocket calendar. So many dates had names on them. Mom doesn’t want to[…]
Comedy · Documentaries · Festivals & Awards
The effect is intimate, but not particularly enlightening. Love, Gilda offers a lot of reminiscing, some sweet (and a few heavy) insights, but very little new information about Radner’s life.[…]
Unassimilated weirdness is typical of Popeye – even in its soundtrack, where goofy “boing” effects are used to accompany ordinary, unheroic movement. Sweethaven’s anthem, the Harry Nilsson song “Everything Is[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy
The Brothers don’t enter into sanctimonious class systems, organizational institutions, or drawing rooms to assimilate and enjoy the fruits of its privileges either; they gain access, enact a savage modus[…]
Activist & Political · Comedy · Horror
Yes, Society supplies the body horror, well crafted in all its sticky glory by Japanese effects expert Screaming Mad George, but it fuses it with teen movie, conspiracy thriller, and[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Directors
“The major point of convergence between Cassavetes and the Dogme movement is an oppositional realist form that blurs the boundaries between being and performing.”
