Growing up, December and January held the distinction of best and worst months in moviegoing, respectively. For a few reasons, these distinctions have melted away. The first of which is simply the disintegration of something called the movie calendar altogether. Traditionally, at least from my layperson's POV, the
Now is the time the caveat "mostly" comes into play. As some of you may know, I recently applied to graduate school, and I wrote a short story and excerpts from a novel to get in. Now that the process is over, I figured I'd share
(Spoilers) Overture Let’s, for a moment, set aside the hysterics, the histrionics, and the hyperbole. Let’s imagine that The Brutalist hasn’t been met with a response equal in rapture to Dark Side of the Moon playing backwards in your veins, with claims not unlike Ignatiy Vishnevetsky’s
I like the serial format, generally; I like what can be done with it to build suspense, to enhance mystery, and to deepen the psychological interiority of a particular work's characters. Crime & Punishment was published serially, for example. The format seems to behoove crime stories, but even
A who’s who of extreme cinema lions hiding in the shadows here: Noe, Cronenberg, Lynch, Easton Ellis/Harron, Von Trier, Argento, and I’m sure I’m neglecting a few more. This shouldn’t work; it’s never worked for me before: arthouse horror sucks. But Fargeat snuck a
Frownland Spoilers Fully expected to hate this; turns out it was made specifically for people who hated the first one. Sat bemused and slightly irritated for the first forty minutes, feelings growing ever exacerbated by the minute following each howl from the Joker Head behind me, but when it reveals
Time Stop A little autobiography: My dad introduced me to Francis Ford Coppola through Apocalypse Now. First by way of his incessant quoting of the movie, particularly the immortal “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” line, and then via the DVD (theatrical, not redux) we had found
NOTE: This is meant to be read in conjunction with my Twisters review. "I'm definitely gonna be the People's champion, but . . . I'm gonna be the champ the way I wanna be." - Muhammad Ali Ring the bell, Deadpool is the People'
Note: Major spoiler in paragraph three. It’s easy to tell that Lee Isaac Chung—director of the modest, exceptional Arkansas drama Minari—wants to make a earnest paean to middle America and its folk culture while integrating the inexorable blemish of capital and technology on that culture, both popularizing
My story with Amadeus began, as I'm sure it often does, with my grandfather. My grandpa always liked movies, but demonstrated a particular inclination following my grandma's death: he would invite me over to watch classics like The Godfather and Gladiator or catch new releases that
There's one major spoiler here in the final paragraph. This one's for the cinephiles. The lovers of film. The celluloid obsessed. And MaXXXine couldn't be worse for it. A smug, satisfied, self-proclaimed "B-movie with A-ideas", MAXXXine is the nadir of Ti West&
Decent. Airless, but decent. Fails to recapture the regional magic of Jeff Nichols's great 2011-2012 masterpieces Take Shelter and Mud, films that sing with urgency and specificity and quite a bit to say about the narratives white Americans follow to gain a sense of footing in a fast-changing
Well, awesome, first of all. Total fucking gongshow creativity and ingenuity here, it's such a thrill to be back in the hands of the maestro after nearly a decade. My relationship to movies--and my orientation toward the world into which movies are birthed--has changed a lot in those
Foreword: My list has been set for months, but I couldn’t resist the urge to tinker with it obsessively until I realized, shit, we are just about to enter the sixth calendar month of the next year. Anyway, here it is. Fashionably late is better than never. There will
Good, but frustratingly close to being really good and occasionally great which makes the fact that it is merely good all the more disappointing. Schoenbrun has a vision, and commands exceptional control of color in their frames. They have big ideas, and a clear affection for the forgotten (and lost,
Spoilers below I'll never forget the feeling of total overwhelming awe that crashed into me upon the conclusion of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, the feeling I chase with just about every movie I ever watch and rarely experience. It wasn't just me, either:
TASHI: What am I? PATRICK: In reality? A really, really, insanely hot woman. - Challengers “Did you ever think there’s more to life than being really, really, really ridiculously good looking?” - Zoolander No Bones & All, with its tearful elegy for a Midwest sunken in sand—Guadagnino’s
Major spoiler at the end of this, FWIW. Moronic, phony Call of Duty knockoff suffused with neoliberal guilt. Insofar as it is successful at anything, it is as a corny allegory for the insufficiency of media to capture the zeitgeist or to animate positive action. Which, okay, are we making
Past Lives is last year's anointed Sundance Darling, and it's a category to which I am not entirely allergic. Beasts of the Southern Wild, Whiplash, and Minari are all films I love. But for every victory there's a maudlin and sycophantic movie that inexplicably
David Ayer initially caught my attention at the age of 12 upon a screening of Street Kings with my grandpa. I was really into violence at the time, but Ayer mostly dropped off the map for me until Suicide Squad, which continues to hold the distinction of worst hatchet job
I had the one in a million good fortune to be able to see this on a 35mm print at Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo. I traveled to Japan because a dear friend invited me along on his pilgrimage to Wrestle Kingdom, the most important event for the largest Japan-based wrestling
American Fiction is delicate—sensitive—in a way few satires are. I expected to write something along the lines of, “it’s fine, but Bamboozled already exists, yada yada yada,” and yes, there are clear parallels between the two. Yet director/adapter Cord Jefferson wisely dodges the jagged edges of
A bunt from Wiseman, which is any other filmmaker’s homer so I still come away fairly satisfied. When it’s focused on the goings-on of the Troisgrois restaurant in Ouches, France, it’s got that same Frederick Wiseman magic I’ve come to love: deep dives into the processes,