Review: “The Last Showgirl”

About midway through The Last Showgirl, we see Pamela Anderson’s Shelly Gardner curled up in the living room of her Las Vegas home, watching a movie. The two shots we briefly see flash across the screen— first of woman clad in a long gown hoisting a glittering hoop, a bevy of chorus girls lying at […]

Best Movies of 2024

I wasn’t so sure that this year ended up being such a great one for movies, at least for me. Some of 2024’s most acclaimed mainstream hits like Challengers, Dune Part 2, and Anora that have been sweeping the awards circuit were mostly misses for me. But when I started combing back through my Letterboxd […]

Review: “A Complete Unknown”

You can’t fully know Bob Dylan. Thats’s something that Todd Haynes understood when he made I’m Not There, his radical 2007 biopic that crafts an image of the legendarily enigmatic musician’s life in fragments portrayed by six different actors, ranging from a young Black boy to Cate Blanchett. Perhaps that’s also something that director James […]

Review: “Nocturnes”

You likely won’t walk out of Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan’s Nocturnes with a lot of newfound facts and figures about moths knocking about in your brain. What their film accomplishes, however, is much more impressive than many nature documentaries: an inherent love for and understanding of the need to protect these creatures, achieved not […]

Review: “Sugarcane”

In 2021, numerous unmarked graves were discovered on the grounds of St. Joseph’s Mission, a former Canadian residential school situated near the Sugarcane Indian Reserve near Williams Lake in British Columbia. This wasn’t the only school where such a discovery was made. It is, however, where directors Julian Brave Noisecat and Emily Kassie choose to […]

Review: “Wicked”

Jon M. Chu’s 2021 film adaptation of the Broadway musical In the Heights made me suspect that he wasn’t a particularly skilled director of musicals. His long-gestating film adaptation of Wicked confirmed it. It’s a shame, because even more so than Heights, there’s a legitimately great movie musical rocking around inside that two hour and […]

Review: “The Room Next Door”

A red door, whose eventual closure will mark a turning point in the lives and relationship between Martha (Tilda Swinton) and Ingrid (Julianne Moore), is just one of many simple yet strong visual markers placed throughout director Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door. Martha is dying of cancer and— unwilling to spend the rest of […]

Review: “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat”

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat— Johan Grimonprez’s documentary tracking the events leading up to the 1961 assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba that’s comprised entirely of archival footage and audio and text excerpts from a wide range of sources and first-hand accounts— opens at the close. Text rippling across the screen illustrate the dialogue between […]

Review: “Anora”

Who is Anora, and what does she want? It’s a question I found repeatedly popping up in the back of my mind as I watched writer and director Sean Baker’s film, the title of which shares his protagonist’s name but not much interest in answering those queries. There are a few points I can confirm. […]

Review: “Memoir of a Snail”

If there’s one person who has experience with just about every seemingly good thing that life throws at you blowing up in your face, it’s me. So maybe that’s why I became so strongly wrapped up in the story of Memoir of a Snail, even as its tugging of its protagonist from terrible life event […]