Tribeca Review: “Breaking the News”

In early 2017, Donald Trump was sworn in as President, and the Women’s March on Washington served as a scream for many of America’s frustrated and scared inhabitants. Amidst the fear and uncertainty, journalist Emily Ramshaw saw a possibility. She left her steady job with the Texas Tribune along with colleague Amanda Zamora and started […]

Review: “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse”

There are your run-of-the-mill superhero movies that dominate theaters these days, and then there’s Spider-Verse. Sony Pictures Animation’s 2018 feature Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which thrust Miles Morales (an Afro-Latino Brooklyn teen who takes up the mantle of Spider-Man and a less-than-familiar face outside of comic books) into the center of the narrative. It’s a […]

Review: “The Little Mermaid” (2023)

It all started around 2010. In the aftermath of the studio’s return to animated princess stories with The Princess and the Frog and on the heels of the release of their next one, Tangled, then-Walt Disney Animation Studios chief creative officer John Lasseter stated that the storied animation house—the bulk of whose legacy rests on […]

Review: “Master Gardener”

If First Reformed asked, “Will God forgive us?” and The Card Counter asked “Is there is a limit to punishment?” while asserting that “the body remembers,” the prevailing question that Master Gardener—the third piece in what has been dubbed writer/director Paul Schrader’s “God’s Lonely Man” trilogy—asks its audience is something a little less fraught: “Are […]

Review: “Fast X”

Nine movies and a trilogy? That’s the direction the Fast and Furious franchise is turning toward, as it begins heading down the long road to wrapping up the series that began 22 years ago as a thriller about street racing. We’ve heard this before; the series’ supposed tenth and final film was soon announced to […]

Review: “Blackberry”

Ask most people now, and they probably would consider the BlackBerry a bit of a joke. One of the first iterations of the smartphone, the rapid decline of the company paired with the design of the phone itself—rather clunky, with a keyboard that takes up half of its surface, compared with the sleek all-touchscreen iPhone—would […]

Review: “The Taking”

John Ford. John Wayne. Cowboys and six-shooters, Native Americans and horses and epic battles to survive not only squabbles with other humans, but the unforgiving landscape they’ve settled in, one made of both towering beauty and abject terror. These elements, and dilemmas physical, moral, and spiritual, have come to define the western film genre. Just […]

Review: “Beau Is Afraid”

At first blush, Beau Is Afraid— the third feature from writer/director Ari Aster—is radically different from his previous works. Hereditary and Midsommar can both be more neatly classified as horror, while his three hour epic Beau Is Afraid can perhaps most succinctly be boiled down to an absurdist interpretation of the hero’s journey. But there’s […]

Review: “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret”

Fifty-three years ago, author Judy Blume published her now-iconic middle-grade novel Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, a book lauded and criticized in equal measure for its frank portrayal of girlhood. And for 50 years, Blume refused repeated attempts to purchase the films rights to the story of Margaret Simon, an 11-year-old girl who […]

Review: “Showing Up”

Lizzy (Michelle Williams) is an artist on the verge of a breakthrough—or a breakdown. Either path seems completely viable throughout Showing Up, writer and director Kelly Reichardt’s low-key yet incisive character study of a working modern artist. By day, Lizzy does administrative work for the Portland art school of which her mother Jean (Maryann Plunkett) […]