Review: “Priscilla”

I didn’t put two and two together until I was standing in the hotel lobby. The same day I was set to go see Priscilla— Sofia Coppola’s screen adaptation of Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir Elvis and Me— I was checking into a hotel, a charming relic of Route 66’s heyday in southwest Missouri. As I […]

Review: “Killers of the Flower Moon”

“The murder plots depended upon doctors who falsified death certificates and upon undertakers who quickly and quietly buried bodies. The guardian who McAuliffe suspected of killing his grandmother was a prominent attorney working for the tribe who never interfered with the criminal networks operating under his nose. Nor did bankers, including the apparent murderer Burt, […]

Review: “Farewell My Concubine” (1993)

In 1993, Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine, a sumptuous, decades-spanning epic based on the Lilian Lee novel, became the first Chinese film to win the Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, tying with Jane Campion’s period drama The Piano. One of the most notable works from who would become one of the most notable […]

Review: “Expend4bles”

Generally poorly executed in story, dialogue, and action, the one pure pleasure the Expendables series had to offer was the joy of watching aging 80s action legends like Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Chuck Norris, and Bruce Willis appearing together on screen, quoting their iconic lines back-and-forth to one another in bouts of fan service banter […]

Review: “A Haunting in Venice”

You have to give Kenneth Branagh some credit. Revealing no flagging interest in Agatha Christie and her famed investigator creation, Hercules Poirot, following his film versions of two of her most famous works, Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile, with a loose adaptation of one of Christie’s lesser known Poirot tales, […]

TIFF Review: “Seagrass”

The long toots of the ferry horn have a lilting, almost musical sound, one that emphasizes the playful mood of the two little girls running around the boat deck. There’s not a cloud in the sky. The calm blue water seems to stretch into infinity. The girls pester their dad for a dollar for some […]

Home Video Review: The Complete Story of Film

“A lie to tell the truth.” That’s one way that filmmaker and critic Mark Cousins describes the nature of filmmaking in the narration that kicks off the first episode of his epic 15 part, 915 minute long documentary The Story of Film: An Odyssey. He’s applying that statement to the Normandy Beach sequence from Steven […]

Review: “We Kill for Love”

A man walks into a cluttered room, settles in, and slowly begins to unpack its contents: dusty pulp novels, VHS tapes of long-forgotten films with titles like Illicit Dreams, Secret Games, and Lipstick Camera that flicker to life in all their low-res glory on a tiny TV set. A narrator (Anthony Penta) identifies this man […]

Review: “Blue Beetle”

A bright young man unexpectedly binds with a mutant insect that grants him superhuman abilities and makes him a target of some bad people who would rather weaponize his powers. That sounds like I’m recounting the origins of the seemingly never-ending series of Spider-man movies, but it’s actually the premise of Blue Beetle, the newest […]

Review: “Scrapper”

“It takes a village to raise a child.” This sentence that appears across a black screen disappears within an instant, scratched out by yellow, crayon-like markings, a new sentence scrawled beneath it in clumsy handwriting: “I can raise myself thanks.” This playful intro kicks both the style and tone of Scrapper into motion. Writer and […]