Focus Features
Bugonia isn’t a typical hostage situation by any stretch of the imagination; director Yorgos Lanthimos and screenwriter Will Tracy play with our biases and perspectives, cheekily throwing our expectations and what we think of as common knowledge out the window.
Read More
Everything’s dark, bleak, and gritty these days. Superhero origin stories, James Bond films, even the color grading on streaming network shows and movies – everything has a sheen of gloom over it. This must be why My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 exists, as a counterpoint to the darkness and drudgery wrought by today’s media. […]
Read More
There’s poetry in every corner and crevice of The Outfit. From the look of the film to its structure to the characters to the performances to the written words, its being creates a picture of unspoken emotions and intent, eventually laid bare with a denouement that simultaneously confounds and delights. Even the title itself is […]
Read More
Paul Thomas Anderson’s films are marvelous for one reason: the offhand way random events happen in his movies. A suicide jumper gets shot while falling? Yup. A drug deal where the tension is augmented by a preteen kid chucking firecrackers around a house? In Anderson’s world, it’s an ordinary nighttime scene in Los Angeles. A […]
Read More
It could be said that Last Night in Soho is director/co-writer Edgar Wright’s homage to the color-saturated Italian horror and Giallo films of the 1960s and 1970s. A naïve girl is accepted into a school in a distant city, whereupon she is embroiled in a mystery reaching far beyond her ken; this is essentially the […]
Read More
Reason to watch: Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Shannon Gripping for a stint, but overall curiously pieced together, “Nocturnal Animals” is a decent thriller adapted from the novel “Tony and Susan” by Austin Wright. Having not read the book, I have no doubt that the translation to celluloid was a difficult undertaking—director Tom Ford’s production has its […]
Read More
Why the Laika animation studio isn’t a name on everyone’s lips like Disney’s Pixar is a total mystery to me. Since 2009, they’ve put out stunningly-animated films using a terrific blend of computer backgrounds and stop motion. Don’t think Ray Harryhausen, though; think more lifelike, truly defined and smoother than Jason and the Argonauts. What […]
Read More
Zach Braff stars as Aidan Bloom, a struggling actor whose one success in a shampoo ad has him clinging to the notion that he’ll one day land a career-changing role in a TV show. His wife Sarah (Kate Hudson) grows quietly embittered as she works a soul-sucking job in order to pay the bills while […]
Read More
With influences ranging from Neill Blomkamp’s “District 9” to Michael Bay’s “The Island” to Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey”, William Eubank’s turn-a-minute thriller “The Signal” is in competition with “Under the Skin” for the most intriguingly bizarre sci-fi film so far this year. Does it all make sense? Absolutely not. Does it need to? Not […]
Read More
I’m always fascinated by independent science-fiction cinema. Films like THX-1138, District 9, Primer, and now William Eubank’s The Signal take us to places that mainstream science-fiction films refuse to go, to the places where there are no fluffy Ewoks, laser pistols, converted DeLoreans, or Prime Directives. These films often say more about us as a […]
Read More