Posted in February 2016

Best of Criterion’s New Releases, February 2016

Best of Criterion’s New Releases, February 2016

We’re a bit light this month in the Criterion department, but one of my Paste Magazine compadres and I managed to squeak out blurbs about Antonio Pietrangeli’s I Knew Her Well and Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid. (This leaves a big The Graduate shaped hole in our coverage, but c’est la vie, c’est la vie.) For my own part, The Kid is … Continue reading

Stay Frosty Oscars: My Half-Assed Academy Awards Predictions

Stay Frosty Oscars: My Half-Assed Academy Awards Predictions

Fair warning: I really didn’t want to write this piece, and I’m doing it out of misguided obligation. Maybe I’m whining, but cut me some slack; I’ve already written about the #OscarsSoWhite fracas, and also contributed a handful of yadda yaddas to Paste Magazine’s annual Oscar preview (though I spend most of my yaddas turning my nose up at the … Continue reading

Paste Magazine’s 2016 Oscar Preview

Paste Magazine’s 2016 Oscar Preview

Well, we did it: we predicted the Oscars. Or, more specifically, we made our Oscar predictions. I have my own personal mumblings about the ceremony coming later today, but if you want to see what the gang at Paste Magazine’s Movies section thinks is going to go down this Sunday, you’d best hightail it on … Continue reading

“Bottle Rocket” at 20

“Bottle Rocket” at 20

Bottle Rocket, Wes Anderson’s 1996 debut feature, turned twenty years old this past Sunday. It’s weird to think that the movie could possibly be that old, but it’s weirder still to consider it in light of how much Anderson’s style has changed since he first premiered it two decades ago. Watching Bottle Rocket along with, … Continue reading

The Real Life Horrors That Inform The Witch

The Real Life Horrors That Inform The Witch

In case you don’t already know: I really liked Robert Eggers’ The Witch. A lot, in fact! So much that apart from that there review I just linked, I also wrote this nifty little piece about some of the film’s historical and cultural foregrounding. The long and short of it is that 17th century New England … Continue reading

Review: The Witch, 2016, dir. Robert Eggers

Review: The Witch, 2016, dir. Robert Eggers

There’s not a lot that I have to say about Roger Eggers’ The Witch that isn’t perfectly encapsulated by a single line from Drew McWeeny’s review out of Sundance 2015. “I’m not sure how you explain what you want in scenes like these to kids,” he wrote of one specific and electrifying moment midway through the … Continue reading

Review: “Remember”, 2016, dir. Atom Egoyan

Review: “Remember”, 2016, dir. Atom Egoyan

“In Hebrew, the name Zev means “wolf,” but the protagonist of Atom Egoyan’s new film,Remember, is more like a lamb. Zev Gutman strikes no predatory impressions when we first meet him lying prone in bed, calling out his dead wife’s name in a state of bestirred delusion. He cuts a feeble figure: He does not … Continue reading