In a ramshackle house in a Tokyo suburb, there lives an impoverished family who steal to survive. The bulk of their finances comes from the pension of grandma Hatsue’s (Kirin Kiki) dead ex-husband, a pittance of ¥60,000 ($527.69) a month—plus…
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is a Violent, Heart-breaking Old West Meditation on Mortality | NYFF 2018
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.…
Angels Are Made Of Light is a Devastating Look at the Struggles to Educate the Next Generation in War-Torn Kabul | NYFF 2018
The teacher tells the children that angels are made of light. We can’t seem them, but looking down from heaven, they can see us. In the bombed out capital of Kabul, all the children see when they look up is…
They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead Movie Review | NYFF 2018
During the post-screening panel following the New York Film Festival premiere of his new film They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead, award-winning documentarian Morgan Neville revealed that of all the artists, political figures, and cultural personalities he’d examined, it was…
Carmine Street Guitars is a Breezy Look at One of the Last True Craftsman of Greenwich Village | NYFF 2018
The old man calls them the “bones of the city”—gangly guitars scraped, carved, and burnt from the discarded lumber of old New York City buildings. He salvages the wood—mostly virgin timber from the Adirondacks harvested over 200 years ago—from dumpsters…
The Film Canon: Lucía (1968)
Alongside Mikhail Kalatozov’s I Am Cuba (1964), Humberto Solás’ Lucía (1968) was one of the formative texts of the new Cuban cinema established in the wake of Fidel Castro’s 1959 Cuban Revolution. Where Kalatozov’s film was a Mosfilm Soviet co-production,…
The Nun Review: ‘Conjuring’ Spin-Off Has None of the Emotional Depth—Or Scares—That Made Its Parent Franchise Work
With all due respect to the considerable talents of horror wunderkind James Wan, the heart and soul of the Conjuring franchise has never been its scares or monsters, but the relationship between its married paranormal investigators/demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren…
