Video Club (Pablo Illanes, 2013)
Reinforced Perspective: Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View (1974)
By Jeremy Carr. Pakula adopts an accordingly striking compositional tension throughout the picture, isolating portions of the frame and dwarfing individuals in an abstract expanse, suggesting both a voyeuristic perspective and an unnerving environmental apprehension.” It might be hard to imagine now, but there was a time when being a […]
Isolation in Contemporary Brooklyn: Tim Sutton’s Funny Face
By Gary M. Kramer. Funny Face may require some work on the viewer’s part to put the pieces together, but for those willing to make the effort, Sutton’s striking drama is ultimately rewarding.” Tim Sutton makes ambitious, hypnotic cinema. His latest effort, Funny Face is another brilliantly shot mood piece […]
Let’s Get Ready to Rubble: Godzilla vs. Kong
By Elias Savada. Over-the-top action (and) ludicrous to the max, yet if you expel all your notions of common sense, there’s a chance you might enjoy it.” A couple of senior citizens – longtime movie icons, too – walk into a big city bar and start a fight. One is […]
What’s Seen and Heard: Barak Barkan’s Silence & Darkness
By Johnnie Hobbs III. A subtle indie thriller…chock-full of slow-burning tension and wonderful performances.” When do secrets and control masked as love become acts of sheer violence? The subtly eerie psychological thriller Silence & Darkness looks to explore this question. Led by first-time feature film writer-director Barak Barkan, Silence & […]
From Milquetoast to Mayhem: Ilya Naishuller’s Nobody
By Elias Savada. Suburban, hum-drum life turns into a darkly orchestrated example of a revenge….” As Ilya Naishuller’s Nobody takes its first steps, Hutch Mansell is one glum family man, stuck in a middle-age existence as an alternate-universe Walter Mitty, one with a dormant and well-hidden, action-powered past. But a […]
The World is Their Puppet: The Taub Brothers’ Externo
By Elias Savada. No, this isn’t The Big Short, and Margot Robbie is nowhere in sight, but I wonder what the financial world might think of this film.” Is it possible for someone with just $2,000 to ultimately own the world? That’s the most unusual hypothesis behind Leandro and Jonathan […]
The Individual, Collective, and Transcendental – ReFocus: The Films of Paul Schrader
Schrader with cinematographer John Bailey on the set of Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985)
A Deadpan Crime Comedy: Quentin Dupieux’s Keep an Eye Out (2018)
By Gary M. Kramer. Keep an Eye Out juggles so many different styles of farcical humor and manipulates the police genre that its few lapses can be forgiven.” French writer/director Quentin Dupieux makes idiosyncratic films that either charm or annoy viewers. Folks who admire the cheekiness of his 2010 breakout […]
A Boy’s Best Friend is His Mother: Ivan Kavanagh’s Son
By Thomas Puhr. A well-crafted genre exercise…[that] ultimately offers mere glimpses of what made The Canal so strange and surprising. One of the great joys of our streaming era is the discovery – usually after scrolling through dozens of bottom drawer B-movies – of an overlooked horror film: one that […]