What if purgatory was a Gestapo police state in contemporary Marseilles? Once again, Christian Petzold’s romantic waltz of Hollywood dreamscape and grounded emotional reality is not so much a distracting contrivance in the case of Transit as a compelling abstraction.…
The Image Book Movie Review | VIFF 2018
There’s a moment in Jean-Luc Godard’s The Image Book where the forerunner of Nouvelle Vague (French New Wave) takes home footage of a young girl who—perhaps for the first time in her life—watches an incoming train coming to a station.…
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.…
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…
Review Roundup: LAFF 2018
The 2018 Los Angeles Film Festival covered a variety of rom-coms that embraced diversity and a slew of sci-fi and horror films that stretched the imaginations of the genre. The Wrong Todd is the standout, with its low-budget sci-fi examination…
Private Life Movie Review: Charming but tedious in execution
In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) is rarely discussed because critics don’t regard it as a “natural birth.” You either conceive your own child or adopt, but god forbid anyone injects shots and meds in their ass to increase their chances of…
‘A Star is Born’ Review: This Musically Inclined Romance is Uneven but Undoubtedly Evocative
A Star is Born,as the fourth iteration of this story, needed to breathe new life into the reincarnatio, an idea that the film references when talking about the familiar and repetitive nature of music. There are only so many notes…