It’s easy to forget that in 1972 the highest grossing film in the United States was Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather which more than doubled the take of the third and fourth runners up, Peter Bogdanovich’s romantic screwball whatchamacallit What’s…
‘Islam & the Future of Tolerance’ Review: A Penetrating Examination of the Struggle Between Atheism and Islam
Desh Avila and Jay Shapiro’s Islam & the Future of Tolerance isn’t so much a debate between Atheism and Islam as it is a debate about the debate between Atheism and Islam, an important nuance in this age of ceaselessly…
The Quake Movie Review: Norway’s New Disaster Film Barely Registers on the Richter Scale
In 2015, Roar Uthaug The Wave made waves—pun not intended—as the self-proclaimed first ever Scandinavian disaster movie. Borrowing heavily from the Roland Emmerich playbook, it followed the fate of a single family trapped in the wake of a 260+ foot…
Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Gauntlet Season 12 Review
Cult comedy show Mystery Science Theater 3000 returned this past Thursday with a new season, their twelfth overall and their second on Netflix. The Thanksgiving release couldn’t have been more appropriate, as the holiday—lovingly known as “Turkey Day” among MSTies—is…
May the Devil Take You is a Satisfying, Gruesome Tribute to Haunted House Chillers
Though perhaps best known here in the West for his contributions to horror anthology films like The ABCs of Death (2012) and V/H/S/2 (2013), Indonesian director Timo Tjahjanto has steadily made a name for himself as one of the rising…
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is a Violent, Heart-breaking Old West Meditation on Mortality
Death has always been a punchline for Joel and Ethan Coen. Its suddenness, its finality, its nihilistic impartiality—these anxieties have flooded their films since their very first, 1984’s Blood Simple, a neo-noir about murderous vengeance horribly spiraling out of control.…
The Other Side of the Wind Sees Long-Awaited Lost Film is a Tired Yet Furious Bridge-Burning
We’ll never actually see Orson Welles’ final film The Other Side of the Wind, no more than we’ll ever actually see Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) or Touch of Evil (1958). But whereas the latter two were taken out of…
