Review: “Asteroid City”

Asteroid City, population 87. You can stand in the middle of the highway that runs through it, turn 360 degrees, and absorb the town in its entirety. There’s the cozy roadside diner and neighboring auto shop. The motor court, with its orderly rows of neatly-appointed white cabins (except for Cabin #7, temporarily replaced by a […]

Review: “Elemental”

Elemental is that classic tale of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy makes grand heroic gesture to win girl back. I’d say that with their 27th feature film, Pixar Animation Studios put their own spin on the old romance trope, but they sort of don’t—except that the boy, in this case, is a being […]

Tribeca Review: “Let the Canary Sing”

“She deserves better” was the first thought that crossed my mind as the credits rolled on Let the Canary Sing, Alison Ellwood’s documentary on the life and career of the pop star Cyndi Lauper. Lauper, who became an instant icon of 80s youth with the release of her album She’s So Unusual (which featured songs […]

Tribeca Review: “The Future”

In writer and director Noam Kaplan’s The Future, the world—or at least, the city of Jerusalem—is recognizable, yet rendered ever so slightly, ever so unsettlingly, off-kilter. Israel is on the cusp of launching a manned mission to the moon. Upbeat commercials advertise new tech of the bleakest sort: a program that uses an algorithm to […]

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 […]