Review: “Godzilla Minus Zero”

Chalk it up primarily to the proximity of my watches, but the film I kept being reminded of while watching Godzilla Minus Zero— writer, director, and visual effects artist Takashi Yamazaki’s sequel to his tremendous 2023 film Godzilla Minus One— was the 1952 drama Children of Hiroshima, which I caught a screening of at KVIFF […]

Review: “Wicker”

Desire— the release of it, and the suppression of it— can drive people wild. Wicker— Eleanor Wilson and Alexander Huston Fischer’s romantic fantasy based on Ursula Wills’ short story “The Wicker Husband”— understands that applies not just to physical lust, but also to the need to be an object of desire, to be wanted and […]

Review: “Clayface”

The day after I watched Clayface— the DC Universe entry that recounts the origin story of the long-standing Batman villain— I happened to attend an all-night horror movie marathon that kicked off with a 35 mm screening of David Cronenberg’s classic 1986 body horror movie The Fly. I don’t think I’d watched The Fly in […]

Review: “You Can See Everything”

As the days wind down, fading as fast as the sun dropping below the swelling waves outside, the walls of reality cave in, flimsy as a house of cards. Fourteen days before Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes begins an eleven-year sentence in federal prison for defrauding investors, Nathan Fielder fully moves into the San Diego beach […]

Review: “Verity”

Midway through Verity— director Michael Showalter’s adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s 2018 psychological thriller novel— Lowen (Dakota Johnson) says at her belated birthday dinner, “I have resting bored face.” It’s a response to Jeremy’s (Josh Hartnett) accusation that she looks like she’s either not listening to him, or is uninterested in what he’s telling her. Humorously […]

Review: “The History of Concrete”

A man whose job is to blast pieces of gum off of sidewalks. A neighborhood who cares for a small fish pond on their block. A business that preserves dead people’s tattoos. A group of spiritualists who spend 52 days out running a 3,100 mile race in a loop around one city block in Queens. […]

Review: “Boorman and the Devil”

Toward the end of Boorman and the Devil— David Kittredge’s impressively thorough and candid documentary about the legendarily troubled production of Exorcist II: The Heretic— the director speaks briefly to Jeff Kanew. Kanew is primarily remembered today for directing 80s comedies like Revenge of the Nerds and Troop Beverly Hills, but in the mid-1970s, he […]

Review: “The End of Oak Street”

It isn’t far into its runtime before the double meaning in the title of David Robert Mitchell’s rather unclassifiable throwback blockbuster The End of Oak Street becomes clear. The first alludes to the film’s literal location, a cul-de-sac at the back of a neighborhood called Flowervale, circa 1982. Our first glimpse of it is one […]

Review: “One Night Only”

As One Night Only, Will Gluck’s portrait of a dystopian hellscape masquerading as a frothy rom-com, approaches its third act, a potential love interest for Monica Barbaro’s Allie caps a whimsically-delivered monologue about how a government mandate forbidding pre-marital sex outside of an annual 12 hour time frame actually makes the act more special and […]

Review: “The Currents”

At first glance, Lina (Isabel Aimé González Sola) appears to have it all. A comfortable life with her husband Pedro (Esteban Bigliardi) and daughter Sofia (Emma Fayo Duarte) in Argentina. A successful career as a fashion designer. So successful, in fact, that she travels to Switzerland to accept an award for her work. The opening […]