There are many Revisionist Westerns and there are many Revisionist chanbara, but there are very few, if any, Revisionist wuxia. While Western and Japanese filmmakers have freely interrogated their national heroic ideals of the cowboy and the samurai, grappling with…
Ibiza Movie Review: Netflix Comedy Charms With Parties And Punchlines
Hollywood is at a loss at what to do with the romantic comedy. Aside from films such as Bridesmaids, A League of Their Own, The Devil Wears Prada and especially last year’s smash hit Girls Trip, the sexist nature of the…
First Reformed Movie Review: Ethan Hawke wrestles with faith and despair in Paul Schrader’s latest triumph
Small details loom large from the first claustrophobic shot of a seemingly tiny church in First Reformed, which has Paul Schrader, the scribe of iconic films Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, returning to write and direct another dark vision of…
Bad Samaritan Movie Review: David Tennant Suffers In Dean Devlin’s Second Strikeout
Dean Devlin has cruised on a very solid and lucky career in Hollywood. Ever since he linked up with Roland Emmerich in the late 1980s, Devlin has racked up a formidable number of hit movies on his resume as a…
Tribeca 2018 Movie Review: When She Runs
Robert Machoian and Rodrigo Ojeda-Beck’s When She Runs is far from an accessible film. Composed primarily of narrative negative spaces that have little if anything to do with a plot, the directors paint their cinematic canvas with lengthy static long…
Tribeca 2018 Movie Review: The Man Who Stole Banksy
There are enough interesting ideas in Marco Proserpio’s The Man Who Stole Banksy to fill two or three fascinating documentaries about the legality of street art, the impact of Western street artists invading minority cultural spaces, and the degradation of…
Tribeca 2018 Movie Review: Blue Note Records – Beyond the Notes
How many music labels can honestly claim to be more than just a label, but an actual brand? Blue Note Records, that scrappy little label founded by two German immigrants in 1939, is one of the few that can—the name…