Category Archives: Movies

Review: Bring Her Back and Good Boy

The Australian Philippou brothers, Danny and Michael, quickly followup their hit debut, Talk to Me, with Bring Her Back, an even more disturbing horror film that relies less on supernatural spookiness; which isn’t to say its plot doesn’t beggar belief, … Continue reading →

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Review: Nouvelle Vague

Richard Linklater is much too practical a director to make a movie that doesn’t attempt to entertain, regardless of the subject matter or mode of expression. As the title of his latest film attests, he means to address the French … Continue reading →

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Review: The Love That Remains and Good Valley Stories

The Icelandic filmmaker and visual artist Hlynur Pálmason requires his audience to put in some effort—not a lot, but enough to force you to pay close attention—in order to make sense of the domestic dynamic at work within the family … Continue reading →

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Review: Gloaming in Luomo and Mothertongue

Korean-Chinese director Zhang Lu’s Gloaming in Luomu won the inaugural Busan Prize in the Competition section of last year’s Busan International Film Festival. Zhang, a mainstay at the festival for two decades, is a master of characterization and setting, though … Continue reading →

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Review: The Outwaters and The Long Walk

Horror movies have been ascendant for decades, but in the last few years, certainly since the end of the pandemic, they’ve become even more commercially viable since they seem to be the only genre outside of children’s animated films that … Continue reading →

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Review: The Last Viking and Pretty Crazy

A lot of comedies, especially those that favor a blacker hue, posit worlds that are in and of themselves insane. The Danish writer and director, Anders Thomas Jensen, creates characters who are eccentric in weird and sometimes dangerous ways. In … Continue reading →

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Review: I Was a Stranger and Rich Flu

It would be hard to name a recent movie that is more timely than Brandt Andersen’s feature debut, I Was a Stranger, which explores, in a granular manner, the circumstances that prompted many people living in wartorn areas of the … Continue reading →

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Review: Immediate Family

Unlike that sprawling collective of session musicians called the Wrecking Crew (a moniker many of them disliked) who played on practically every record that came out of Southern California in the 1960s, the Immediate Family, a mere five guys who … Continue reading →

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Review: Die My Love

I agree with the critical consensus that John Cassavettes’ A Woman Under the Influence is the definitive cinematic treatment of female mental illness in a connubial setting. The movie stakes its credibility on a marital dynamic that is perhaps specific … Continue reading →

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Review: Eleanor the Great and The Rule of Jenny Pen

Though Eleanor Morgenstein is only the second leading film role that the 94-year-old American actor June Squibb has ever done, the novelty of such an aged person playing the titular character in a major motion picture like Eleanor the Great—the … Continue reading →

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