Review: “Avatar: Fire and Ash”

Almost every entry in director James Cameron’s filmography marks a massive technological leap forward for cinema. Terminator 2: Judgement Day contains the first entirely computer-generated character. Titanic— the most expensive film ever made at the time of its release— merges old school epic storytelling and practical effects with computerized visuals to great impact. Avatar broke […]

Review: “The Voice of Hind Rajab”

It’s difficult to rate a film that dramatizes a real life event that is so recent and raw, and the product of a conflict that is still ongoing. It’s also difficult to deny the daring nature and beating heart of The Voice of Hind Rajab, which opens with the following title card: “The film is […]

Holiday Classics: “The Apartment” (1960)

No other Christmas film, no matter how bleak, walks quite as delicate a line between pathos and pleasure as Billy Wilder’s bittersweet 1960 comedy The Apartment. The film centers around C.C. “Bud” Baxter (Jack Lemmon), a lonely pushover who works as an office drone at a New York City insurance company. He allows his managers […]

Holiday Classics: “Our Vines Have Tender Grapes” (1945)

Our Vines Have Tender Grapes is exactly the sort of heart-warming family drama MGM excelled at. That may make it sound overly trite and sentimental, but the film is crafted with such earnest sincerity, from its skilled performances to its charming vintage production design, in which studio soundstages stand in for rural Wisconsin. That’s where […]

Holiday Classics: “Backfire” (1950)

The bulk of the action in Backfire may occur over the early days of January, but the holidays are a recurring backdrop over the course of this 1950 noir directed by Vincent Sherman. Gordon MacRae (in only his third feature film and on the brink of becoming a big musical star) and genre staple Edmond […]

Review: “Wake Up Dead Man”

It would be so easy to make every entry in the Knives Out series a cookie cutter whodunit, coasting by on the charms of lead Daniel Craig and the increasingly starry revolving door of famous faces who populate the rest of the cast. It’s a credit to series creator, writer and director Rian Johnson, however, […]

Review: “WTO/99”

Astonishing, incendiary, and eerily prescient, Ian Bell’s documentary WTO/99 may depict one single event in American history, but does so in manner that reveals the ripple effects that globalization and anti-environmental, anti-labor practices— far from mainstream, hot button issues at the brink of the new millennium— have had on our current climate, economic, and human […]

Review: “Hamnet”

Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet opens with a quote from a 2004 article by Stephen Greenblatt titled “The Death of Hamnet and the Making of Hamlet”: “Hamnet and Hamlet are in fact the same name, entirely interchangeable in Stratford records in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.” It’s a plain, matter-of-fact statement, not the sort of […]

Review: “Wicked: For Good”

When I reviewed Jon M. Chu’s big-screen adaptation of the first half of the hit Broadway musical Wicked around this same time last year, I was surprised to find that it had some merit— in its performances, and its translation, and its broadening of the source material— given my distaste for both the show and […]

Review: “Die My Love”

Die My Love opens on an unexpected scene of stillness: a static camera trained on the interior of a rural Montana home, quietly observing the two people maneuvering around inside it: Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and her partner Jackson (Robert Pattinson), who inherited the dilapidated house from his uncle, who committed suicide there. Perhaps that doesn’t […]