By Anees Aref. Audiences usually averse to non-English language fare should find much to enjoy….” Think again before joining a Belgian summer camp. A lot of trouble is brewing for the young scouts in the new suspenser Coyotes, a Belgian-Luxembourg produced series where youthful tensions and unsavory adult supervision clash […]
The Imperialists are Still Alive!: Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch
By James Slaymaker. Anderson is evidently not without talent, but he has continuously proven to be content to rest on his laurels…. The French Dispatch ultimately amounts to nothing more than hollow juvenilia.” Towards the end of Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, a group of staff writers, illustrators and other […]
Off with His Egghead!: Adam Donen’s Alice, Through the Looking (2021)
By Thomas Puhr. Pretense is not a bad word in Alice, Through the Looking; it’s a given…. The question becomes whether or not these antics serve a purpose beyond provocation.” In Alice, Through the Looking (2021) writer-director Adam Donen quickly announces his intention to break as many perceived conventions as […]
The Power of ‘Yes’: A Wakefield Poole Remembrance
By Andrew Repasky McElhinney. Poole’s life covers an enviable (at least in retrospect, at least to me) span of the post-WWII 20th century America…. [with] one of the first positive representations of Gay life and Gay sex in the U.S., and a talisman for the then emerging Pride movement.” I […]
K-Noir, Stateside: The Cast and Filmmaker Discuss Hide and Seek
By Ali and Amir Moosavi. One of the issues for young directors is that everything is computer based and [they] are brilliant in creating a short film and doing the CG and the graphics and the editing themselves…like an all-hands-on-deck kind of filmmaker. But what is lost is clarity in […]
The Stoic Sadness of Stephen Karam’s The Humans
By Elias Savada. As its lights dim into darkness and its cacophony of building noises rise up, The Humans poses as a survivor’s journey….Karam offers a absorbing approach to how the dead continue to haunt us.” In the lead up to this year’s Thanksgiving holiday, many Americans are finally escaping […]
Cycles of Regret: Children of Divorce (1927)
By Tony Williams. While Children of Divorce appears to have some superficial resemblances to those DeMille “roaring 20s” catalogs of the foibles and foolishness of the idle rich, its underlying premises are more somber. The home video release of Children of Divorce is the latest collaboration between Flicker Alley and […]
Don’t Call Her Old: Omara
By Anees Aref. A loosely structured film veering back and forth between the past and present….It’s filled with nostalgia and sentiment, though as we hang around Omara we find she is interested in neither [and] focused on the present….” Omara Portuondo, the Grand Dame of the Riviera, aka the Grand […]
“There Seems to be a Slight Mistake” – Edward Everett Horton: 8 Silent Comedies
By Jeremy Carr. As a silent film comedian, Horton crafted a distinctive identity, and when working under the aegis of Harold Lloyd, starring in a series of two-reel shorts for the celebrated filmmaker’s Hollywood Productions, he reveled in stories perfectly suited to his comic temperament.” Edward Everett Horton looked funny, […]
Abel and an Eerily Empty Rome: an Interview with Abel Ferrara on Zeros and Ones
By Yun-hua Chen. At the beginning [of the pandemic and lockdown], I wouldn’t have had the nerve to [make a film on it] because I didn’t know what was going on, the amount of tragedy, the amount of suffering going around, and I was trying to just deal with what […]