Speaking to a filmmaker for the second time about their work is always a strange-ish experience, one that I lived through earlier this year with Trey Edward Shults, but I’m not really going to complain about getting to chat up artists like Shults and Sean Baker twice. You might remember that I talked to Baker back … Continue reading →
Movie Mezzanine, one of my long-time outlets (if you count two years, give or take, as a long time on any quantifiable scale), underwent a makeover in 2016, and I’m happy to share my first contribution to the site in all of its new and shiny glory: an essay about the Catholic Church sex scandal on … Continue reading →
“Imagine the unimaginable: One moment you’re out enjoying a beautiful, sunny day with your friends and your sisters, and the next, your grandmother is slapping you silly for having inappropriate contact with boys. Everything else snowballs from there: You’re whisked off to the doctor for a virginity test, your personal possessions are shut up in … Continue reading →
“For aficionados of brutal genre films, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant has enough to keep you satisfied. Find scenes of bravura violence photographed by an eminent cinematographer (the great Emmanuel Lubezki). Find the vague impression of deep, abiding meaning. Find bear-mauling, equine disembowelment. Find rape, castration, graphic suffering. Find additional suffering. Find more suffering. And … Continue reading →
“The word “infidelity” likely conjures very specific images in the minds of most; a young couple entangled in a forbidden tryst, lonesome spouses finding succor in the arms of another person, egotists two-timing their partners in hotels for the sheer thrill of it. But we’re just as capable of emotional betrayals as carnal liaisons, of … Continue reading →
“‘Looks can be deceiving,’ says Michael Madsen to Kurt Russell upon first introduction in The Hateful Eight. No four words could be more appropriate to the moment, or to the movie: Russell’s character, a bounty hunter named John Wayne Ruth, is distrusting by nature, even more so because he has a prisoner named Daisy Domergue … Continue reading →
“Last year, animation distributor GKIDS managed to score two nominations in the AMPAS’ Best Animated Feature Film category: Tom Moore’s Song of the Sea and Isao Takahata’s The Tale of Princess Kaguya. By contrast, their 2015 slate looks less prestigious, with two mixed bags in Extraordinary Tales andKahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, plus the good but … Continue reading →
“In the Heart of the Sea is a movie with an identity problem. It’s also a movie with an acting problem, a staging problem, a plot problem, a handful of FX problems and a narrative framework problem. Did Ron Howard learn nothing from Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby? Apparently, the takeaway from that film is … Continue reading →
“Just in time for the holidays, here’s a slice of existential parental terror: The World of Kanako, Japanese filmmaker Tetsuya Nakashima’s follow-up to his 2010 film, Confessions. That picture made the AMPAS shortlist for Best Foreign Language Film back in 2011. By contrast, it’s hard to imagine the pundits who comprise the Academy’s voting body … Continue reading →
“America is having a renewed—but frankly disappointing—dialogue on the subject of immigration in 2015. Our great country doesn’t exactly have a pristine record when it comes to welcoming émigrés, of course, and so the undercurrent of angry paranoia voiced in that dialogue is neither new, nor especially surprising. It is, however, counterintuitive: The U.S. is … Continue reading →
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