Excerpt: There are echoes of many great films and filmmakers in Glass’s work – Polanski’s ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ and ‘Repulsion,’ Stanley Kubrick, ‘The Exorcist’ and even Lars von Trier. And yet her film never feels derivative.
Excerpt: The whole therefore becomes like one of the tornadoes spinning in Maud’s view. It tightens and tightens before touching down to wreak its havoc.
Excerpt: Expertly building suspense and tension – and popping that bubble perfectly with some of the most effective jump scares of recent memory – ‘Saint Maud’ has all the markings of a horror great, with a killer ending to boot.
Excerpt: On the plus side, the opening credits sequence is quite nice, the costumes and sets are convincing in a television budget sort of way, and there’s enough cleverness in the way the story is spun out, with a nice little button at the end, to make it satisfying.
Excerpt: Newly issued on a blu-ray packed with extras by Arrow Video, it is fascinating to regard the work of director Chan-wook Park (“Oldboy,” “The Handmaiden”) before his vengeance trilogy catapulted him to global recognition.
Excerpt: Some of the sets from Frankenstein were re-used for this film, and Whale’s characteristic nods to German Expressionism, the care he takes with every shot, and the racy content smuggled in so you can see it if you want to, and miss it if you don’t, makes this more than just a studio obligation fulfilled.
Excerpt: If you were to sit down and watch every film below, you would be taken from rural towns in the heart of the Florida peninsula to rural towns in the heart of the Ukraine via the protests of Hong Kong and a nursing home in Chile. There are serious themes, important subjects, powerful ideas… and hand sanitizer. There’s also a stripper named Nomi. Something for everything, I reckon…
Excerpt: [The students] They’re also aware that their achievements may not be the only thing that matter when it comes to getting into the college of their choice, and that their high school and ancestry may be working against them.
Excerpt: Michelle Pfeiffer and Lucas Hedges propel a mismatched cast of oddballs reveling in an absurd situation looking for a cat who contains the consciousness of the dead husband. Thank goodness it’s not something off-the-wall or unbelievable.
Excerpt: Levinson complicates the power dynamics of a relationship with the artistic demands and insecurities of Hollywood and wraps it up in a shimmering black and white package.
Excerpt: Once you cut through all the real-world baggage the film arrives with and one mean script, there are two superior lead performances, gorgeous black and white cinematography, and a virtuoso use of music.
Excerpt: Although the film is not devoid of strengths, it is repetitive and loses its way, tiring the viewer with a series of overwhelming discussions.
Excerpt: The religious overtones come towards the end of this searing examination of racial politics during the 1960s. And when they arrive, in a sequence that is most assuredly a shout-out to the Last Supper, director/co-writer Shaka King has earned the right, and then some, to invoke the metaphor
Excerpt: If you don’t know about the 1969 murder of Chicago Black Panthers Chairman Fred Hampton at the behest of J. Edgar Hoover, prepare to be shocked. If you do know the story, prepare to watch this film with a sick feeling in the pit of your stomach.
Excerpt: Shaka King has made a powerful film about loyalty and treachery and the continuing struggle for Black self-determination. In the wake of the George Floyd protests of last summer, which drew attention to state-sanctioned violence and murder perpetrated against Black people, King’s movie is as timely as ever.
Excerpt: Robin Wright makes her directorial debut with a clichéd story that shows her capable of directing actors and shepherding a nice production. What she hasn’t done is buff out some of the more questionable aspects of the script
Excerpt: Taking full advantage of its awe-striking setting, ‘Land’ explores a woman’s path to recovery after unspeakable tragedy and is held up by delicate direction and a pair of soulful performances from Robin Wright and Demián Bichir.
Excerpt: Overall, ‘Casanova’ is overlong, unsympathetic, miscast, and a failure of tone. That’s not to say it’s entirely without interest, however; this is Fellini, so there’s always the possibility that some carnival with a 7-foot woman attended by two dwarfs in powdered wigs is waiting around the next bend.
Excerpt: In Wiseman’s eyes, no detail is too small or too unimportant to depict on screen; he manages to elevate seemingly mundane moments into something cinematic simply by virtue of pointing his camera at them. With a total runtime of more than 10 hours, this loose trilogy of films paints a nuanced portrait of the wide range of work that is necessary if we want to even attempt to keep the so-called “American Experiment” from imploding.
Excerpt: We watch [everything] with the implicit request [to] forgive him because he’s a dying old man. No technical or artistic success overcomes [ignoring that request’s danger].
Excerpt: Bemusement abounds, as does amusement, and when it’s all over, don’t fight the urge to prove that you are not actually a brain in a laboratory jar.
Excerpt: A sort of ouroboros that simultaneously travels forwards and backwards to make it so we as viewers ascribe meaning to moments before fully grasping how they truly go together.
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