Tribeca Review: “Chasing Chasing Amy”

In 1994, Kevin Smith’s black-and-white, low-budget comedy Clerks took the indie film world by storm, first at its Sundance premiere (which it entered with virtually no buzz), then critics and audiences, cracking many end-of-the-year lists. Smith’s 1995 follow-up Mallrats was less well-received. But it’s Smith’s third film set in the same universe, the 1997 romantic […]

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: “Twilight” (1990)

Hungarian filmmaker György Fehér’s 1990 noir Twilight (Szürkület), loosely based on Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s 1958 novel The Pledge: Requiem for the Detective Novel, is a film that’s been so rarely seen, there isn’t even an existing Wikipedia article about it, and the press release announcing its new 4K restoration wasted no time drawing a comparison 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: “Passion” (2008)

When friends gather at a restaurant—a glimpse at the sign above the entrance, El Secreto, not-so-subtly foreshadowing what’s about to occur inside— to celebrate Kaho’s (Aoba Kawai) birthday, the jovial gathering spirals into an evening fraught with questions and confusion when Kaho and her boyfriend Tomoya (Ryuta Okamoto) make an announcement that ought to have […]

Cinema Classics: “The FBI Story” (1959)

In just over a week, Martin Scorsese’s highly-anticipated next film, Killers of the Flower Moon, will have its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. The over three hour period epic is an adaptation of David Grann’s best-selling 2017 non-fiction book which details the Osage Indian murders. Occurring from roughly the 1910s through the early […]