Review: “You, Me & Tuscany”

As comforting as a warm platter of pasta, You, Me & Tuscany welcomes the return of the predictable, low-stakes romantic comedy to theaters. Director Kat Coiro and writer Ryan Engle’s film is the sort of movie that nowadays is typically relegated to straight-to-streaming— so much so that when I first glimpsed its poster, featuring its […]

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Review: “The Drama”

What did she do? That was the core question following the initial trailer for Kristoffer Borgli’s The Drama, the one driving the intrigue for this darkly funny, cringe-inducing film about a seemingly idyllic relationship that runs off the rails in the lead-up to a wedding. Gathered around a table in a dimly lit caterer’s dining […]

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Review: “The Bride!”

In this video for Letterboxd, Jessie Buckley cites Barbara Stanwyck’s performance in the 1933 drama Baby Face as a key influence on her dual role as Mary Shelley and the Bride of Frankenstein in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! (the obvious comp is Elsa Lanchester’s dual role as the same in James Whale’s 1935 film, although […]

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Review: “By Design”

With a lucidity that’s amusingly reflected in the lyrics of the Gershwin tune that recurs over the course of its runtime— “There’s a saying old, says that love is blind”— writer and director Amanda Kramer tackles the absurdity and tragedy of objectification in her latest feature film, By Design, the way that only a filmmaker […]

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Review: “The President’s Cake”

The opening title card of The President’s Cake presents a paradox so absurd, it can only be real: following the start of the Gulf War in 1990, UN-imposed sanctions on Iraq greatly restrict the country’s resources, causing even the most common household staples to become not only expensive, but scarce, for average citizens. And yet […]

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Review: “Send Help”

About a third of the way into Sam Raimi’s Send Help, Rachel McAdams’ purportedly meek office drone Linda Liddle stabs the wild boar she’s been tracking to provide food for herself and Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien), the obnoxious colleague she’s stranded on a remote island somewhere in the Gulf of Thailand with, in the face, […]

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Review: “Dead Man’s Wire”

Dead Man’s Wire is as lean and taut as they come, launching into action with little preamble. And yet, the film opens not with Tony Kiritsis (a live-wire Bill Skarsgård) entering the downtown office of his mortgage broker Richard Hall (Darce Montgomery), who he will very soon be taking hostage, believing that Hall and his […]

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