“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.”[…]
In her fourth report from the Tribeca Film Festival, Claire Baiz looks at first-time feature director Matt Ratner’s intriguing family drama Standing Up, Falling Down, which, as a thoughtful film[…]
“The root of oppression is loss of memory.” – Paula Gunn Allen1 * * * The end of the world is a mansion in the middle of the desert. A[…]
Drama · Historical & Epic · Women in Film
These women want their words to be heard. They want their will to be known. They want to be able to change their minds. And they want the full mind-body[…]
Even the languid pace Cuarón uses throughout the film seems to want to elevate the (feminine and domestic) virtue of soul-nurturing stillness over the (masculine) trait of destructive freneticism. Some[…]
Drama · Horror · SF & Fantasy
Given the fact that sex and violence are alleged to be as normalized in our culture as wind blowing through the trees, in Bird Box, Malorie’s shock even appears prudish[…]
“All the things we should’ve said that I never said/ All the things we should’ve done that we never did/ All the things we should’ve given but I didn’t/ Oh,[…]
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[…]
The Prince: “I haven’t yet had a report from your office. What’s your work like?” The Warden: “Every night the same. Every night till the heart beats as if it[…]
Theirs is a passive outlook, young men products of a culture that for too many generations has grown to depend on a corporate entity, mistaking the mill for a permanent,[…]
Look Back in Anger (Tony Richardson, 1959); The Entertainer (Tony Richardson, 1960); Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Karel Reisz, 1960); A Taste of Honey (Tony Richardson, 1961); The Loneliness of[…]
Nearly fifty years after its release, it’s clear Midnight Cowboy pulled off a neat trick. Its story of a naïve “Texas longhorn bull” hustler and a low-rent con man is[…]
Michael Clayton is a character who gets a wake-up call. It’s not an “oh, wow, they killed off that character” moment, it’s not a clever reveal, it’s not an “instant[…]
Drama · Historical & Epic · War
The Third Man ends with rejection, physical and emotional death, a descent into a sewer, a walk through a graveyard and cold silence. The ruins of Vienna come to symbolize[…]
MY CHUM, JANE LILEE, Being as it’s coming up on the anniversary of our meeting, I thought I’d check in with you, and maybe get points for remembering the occasion.[…]
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[…]
I don’t like these three guys in this coffee shop either. I can’t help but compare them to the Ghostbox opportunists who were written to be disliked. That much –[…]
