As far as midseason finales go, “The Spear” seems a little tame. There are great moments with Cas and Jack, plus the return of Garth, but it ultimately fails to capture the tension midseason finales should have. It doesn’t help…
Patrick Wang’s ‘A Bread Factory’ is a Dizzying Callback to the Intimate Human Epics of the Hollywood New Wave
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 Mule Movie Review: Clint Eastwood Stumbles Again
Once the proud pillar of American cinematic masculinity, nowadays Clint Eastwood is the Hollywood embodiment of the “old man yells at cloud” meme (or chair, in his case). At 88-years-old, he’s directed seven movies in the last decade and even…
Capernaum Movie Review: A flawed but essential portrait of childhood poverty
Capernaum is about two hours of near unrelenting bleakness, but it’s the kind of bleakness that’s also a mostly intelligent indictment of just how we all let it come to this. The opening scene is hard enough, as we see…
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…
Tyrel Movie Review: A genre bending examination of bro culture
The precise genre categorization of Sebastián Silva’s Tyrel is difficult to pin down in concrete terms, namely because it is based entirely on the specific cultural baggage each individual viewer brings to the film. For many, it’s a horror movie;…