Review: “Wolf Man”

The opening of Leigh Whannell’s Wolf Man isn’t supremely tense or novel, but it is, at least, promising. Grady Lovell (Sam Jaeger) is hunting with his young son Blake (Zac Chandler) in the forest surrounding their remote Oregon home. The prologue’s doom-laden text, detailing rumors surrounding a missing hiker in the area and a possible […]

Review: “The Last Showgirl”

About midway through The Last Showgirl, we see Pamela Anderson’s Shelly Gardner curled up in the living room of her Las Vegas home, watching a movie. The two shots we briefly see flash across the screen— first of woman clad in a long gown hoisting a glittering hoop, a bevy of chorus girls lying at […]

Review: “A Complete Unknown”

You can’t fully know Bob Dylan. Thats’s something that Todd Haynes understood when he made I’m Not There, his radical 2007 biopic that crafts an image of the legendarily enigmatic musician’s life in fragments portrayed by six different actors, ranging from a young Black boy to Cate Blanchett. Perhaps that’s also something that director James […]

Review: “Nocturnes”

You likely won’t walk out of Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan’s Nocturnes with a lot of newfound facts and figures about moths knocking about in your brain. What their film accomplishes, however, is much more impressive than many nature documentaries: an inherent love for and understanding of the need to protect these creatures, achieved not […]

Review: “Wicked”

Jon M. Chu’s 2021 film adaptation of the Broadway musical In the Heights made me suspect that he wasn’t a particularly skilled director of musicals. His long-gestating film adaptation of Wicked confirmed it. It’s a shame, because even more so than Heights, there’s a legitimately great movie musical rocking around inside that two hour and […]

Review: “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat”

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat— Johan Grimonprez’s documentary tracking the events leading up to the 1961 assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba that’s comprised entirely of archival footage and audio and text excerpts from a wide range of sources and first-hand accounts— opens at the close. Text rippling across the screen illustrate the dialogue between […]

Review: “Anora”

Who is Anora, and what does she want? It’s a question I found repeatedly popping up in the back of my mind as I watched writer and director Sean Baker’s film, the title of which shares his protagonist’s name but not much interest in answering those queries. There are a few points I can confirm. […]

Review: “Memoir of a Snail”

If there’s one person who has experience with just about every seemingly good thing that life throws at you blowing up in your face, it’s me. So maybe that’s why I became so strongly wrapped up in the story of Memoir of a Snail, even as its tugging of its protagonist from terrible life event […]

Review: “Emilia Pérez”

Jacques Audiard has been directing movies for 30 years, often playing with genre— from the crime picture A Prophet to the romantic drama Rust and Bone to the western The Sisters Brothers— but I wish I could be more impressed by the supreme confidence with which he pulls off his most audacious feature to date, […]

Review: “Saturday Night”

In 2008, Jason Reitman served as a guest writer and director on Saturday Night Live for one week. The filmmaker already had two acclaimed features under his belt— the 2005 satire Thank You For Smoking and the 2007 coming-of-age comedy Juno— but cites participating in the freewheeling energy that goes into mounting the weekly live […]