Gillian Robespierre delighted audiences with her debut feature, Obvious Child, in 2014. With her co-writer, Elizabeth Holm, and her star, Jenny Slate, she created a pro-choice comedy that was both sharp and controversial. Her sophomore feature, Landline has Robespierre teaming…
Movie Review: Person to Person
It’s rather hard to be cavalier about someone else’s problems when they take them so seriously and so personally. Oh wait, no it isn’t. Especially when they’re the types of problems found in Person to Person, which might as well…
Movie Review: Turn It Around: The Story of East Bay Punk
“It’s a conversation with society, and often, it’s an argument,” declares narrator Iggy Pop in a statement providing context for punk rock in the opening of Turn It Around: The Story of East Bay Punk, and it doesn’t take long…
Movie Review: First Kill
The opening shot of the movie may be its best. The remainder of the movie is very mediocre. Hayden Christensen stars as a father on a mission to rescue his kidnapped young son with Bruce Willis playing the police chief…
Movie Review: Lady Macbeth
The period drama is best identified by it swoon-inducing romantic subplots and heavy melodrama. If the characters in Lady Macbeth stumbled upon the figures from a Jane Austen novel, a fistfight would probably ensue. William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth undoes all…
NYAFF Movie Review: The Taking of Tiger Mountain
Tsui Hark’s The Taking of Tiger Mountain is ostensibly a retelling of an actual conflict during the twentieth century Chinese Civil War where a band of 30 Communist soldiers in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) successfully infiltrated and defeated a…