Downhill is one of the first movies ever to be released under the newly-branded Searchlight Pictures, and in some ways it might represent what Disney has in mind for many of its future films to come under the previously-named Fox Searchlight.…
Never Rarely Sometimes Always Review: Director Eliza Hittman shows the kids aren’t all right, and that’s not really our problem. | Sundance 2020
In Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Sundance directing alum Eliza Hittman (Beach Rats) engages with a subject quite frequently explored in films and television, but never quite to the same cold, graphic detail as it’s depicted here. That topic is abortion, and…
The Assistant Review: A timely examination of manipulation and complicity | Sundance 2020
It’s not an exaggeration to say that Hollywood has found only middling success at best when it comes to reckoning with the MeToo movement, perhaps in part because audiences have to weigh the obvious irony. As we all know by…
Weathering With You Movie Review: Director Makoto Shinkai has delivered another stunner
Director Makoto Shinkai has delivered greater films than his latest, the climate change aware Weathering With You. His films such as 5 Centimeters Per Second and the 2016 megahit Your Name offered greater nuances in storytelling as opposed to the…
Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman is a Towering, Tiring Meditation on Fatherhood, Love, and Grief
At a Q&A following a revival of Martin Scorsese’s Casino (1995) earlier this year in New York City, screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi explained that he saw Scorsese’s upcoming film The Irishman as the last in a quartet of gangster films starring…
Judy Movie Review: Garland and Zellweger deserve better than another mediocre biopic
Today in stories of men who take it upon themselves to tell the story of a woman’s pain, we have the well-intentioned Judy, which fails to fully bring the performer to life. Renée Zellweger incredible efforts can’t save it despite…
Loro Movie Review: A gorgeously messy study of the diabolical burlesque of the powerful
Filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino has an uncanny talent of studying the rise, and, consequentially, of the powerful. His entire filmography is replete with stunning explorations of individuals situated at the highest echelons of political and economic dominance; his films acknowledge and…