Excerpt: If you love cinematic strangeness, Japanese-style, then you’ll be hooked from the moment “the Strangling Monster” flips his head to restore the combover that’s slipped out of place as he tosses the top half of a skyscraper into a nearby river.
Excerpt: It Happened One Night. the 1934 Best Picture Oscar winner, was the first film to get awards in all five top categories, including Best Actor and Best Actress for Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert
Excerpt: The first of three big screen versions of The Mutiny on the Bounty, th 1935 Best Picture Oscar, is still the most compelling, largely due to the superb acting of Charles Laughton and Clark Gable
Excerpt: Frank Capra became the most acclaimed filmmaker of the Depression era, when You Can’t Take It With You won the 1938 Best Picture Oscar and he received his third Best Director Oscar
Excerpt: First time feature director Shannon Murphy turns an Australian stage play (adapted by its author Rita Kalnejais) into a dramedy about embracing life with strong subtexts about psychiatry versus art therapy and prescribed versus recreational drug abuse.
Excerpt: It’s a messy existence that mirrors the unpredictability of life and yet the filmmakers never chastise their characters or moralize their actions.
Excerpt: …like “Paranormal Activity” crossed with Ty West’s “Innkeepers” with writer Todd Klick adding a psychological twist… This one’s claim of having been based on true events is also more valid than most.
Excerpt: : It’s hard to pin down in its early goings, often seeming almost parodic… but once Da 5 are reunited in the jungle, the film coalesces into something powerful.
Excerpt: On its surface, Da 5 Bloods is an exhilirating adventure filled with twists, turns, and Spike Lee’s iconic style. However, it’s also a depth-filled character study that his heartbreakingly prescient about our present moment.
Excerpt: Spike Lee’s approach to the material is done with a stirring relevance and fearlessness that shows he is still able to capture the pulse of the zeitgeist better than pretty much anyone else out there.
Excerpt: There is action and drama aplenty, but Spike Lee isn’t here to just entertain us; he never is, he’s here to educate us. We’re on a guided tour of how the black man is the foundation of the United States of America, yet has only received scorn and torment in return.
Excerpt: That’s not to say that the good doesn’t outweigh the bad, though. I merely hypothesize that a great two-hour drama exists within this over-inflated, two and a half hour epic.
Excerpt: Spike Lee’s indelible style, wit, and focus on black issues is what makes the picture as good as it is. He has created – in collaboration with the actors portraying them – four black men who are all dealing with what the Vietnam War did to them. They do so in different ways, and Lee explores the unique ways in which trauma affects and is expressed by those who have survived it.
Excerpt: As a violent home invasion thriller, it’s engaging, it’s intense, Lulu Wilson and Kevin James are both stellar, and it absolutely delivers for genre fans looking to have a gnarly good time.
Excerpt: Becky is bad, just not in a way that’s any fun, and Kevin James neither embarrasses himself nor has an Uncut Gems moment like his pal Adam Sandler.
Excerpt: Writing about movies feels trite right now, but this one is about an angsty tween absolutely eviscerating a gang of hateful Nazis, including one played by Kevin James, and that’s always welcome. Feel-good movie of the summer so far.
Excerpt: Someone has to learn something from [the scenario’s] potential horror. If neither [Becky] nor we learn anything, it’s all just been an exploitative mess of genre tropes.
Excerpt: Brutal, necessary watch for all who want to understand why America operates with impunity re its horrendous treatment of Black people. Incisive and shocking, moreso now than when it debuted in 2016.
Excerpt: Showgirls, in all its figurative and literal naked glory, is tacky, tawdry, sleazy and at times flat-out bonkers. Despite its awfulness, I can see why so many enjoy its almost gleeful brazenness.
Excerpt: Victor and Victoria is a marvelous comedy which never lets you forget that you are viewing a created object (not the least because much of the dialogue is sung, making this film something of an operetta) and which thus has no need to adhere to the dictates of naturalism.
Excerpt: During grim times like this Covid-19 pandemic, I find myself thinking about movies that have made me feel good after watching them. These five films below are my favorites – and I enjoy viewing them over and over again.
Excerpt: a more benevolent take on the star/underling dynamic of many films that have come before it with a surprise up its sleeve which you may not see coming and which helps to alleviate some unfortunate flaws.
Excerpt: Featuring a mind blowing, career best performance from Elizabeth Moss, “Shirley” is a tour de force of imagination, director Josephine Decker (“Madeline’s Madeline”) keeping her camera in close to get us inside Shirley’s head.
Excerpt: The film’s overwhelming and somewhat chaotic opening prepares you for its penchant for tension—sexual, suspenseful, and otherwise. On the other hand, the introduction to Shirley barely scratches the surface of the unpredictable rollercoaster that she is
Excerpt: Elisabeth Moss is as great as you’d expect. Josephine Decker’s stylistic touches can sometimes be frustrating, but is more often offers a striking and thrillingly inventive look into the mind of her characters.
Excerpt: A beautiful-ugly film, a work of domestic gothic grotesquerie, of women’s suffocation and sacrifice, pain and isolation. Elisabeth Moss’s performance is next-level glorious in its wackadoo intensity.
Excerpt: Decker portrays it all as though it’s one of Jackson’s psychological horrors—[stepping] to the precipice of danger before all tension releases with a cut.
Excerpt: If Shirley is a biopic at all, it’s by way of psychological thriller. Decker and screenwriter Sarah Gubbins infuse myriad themes into the picture, everything from dread of pregnancy and childbirth, female sexual desire, toxic male behavior (with plenty of toxic female behavior, too), and psychological mind games.
