Review: “Percy Green: Man of ACTION”

I’m not from St. Louis, but I’ve lived here long enough that it feels egregious that I’d never heard of activist Percy Green before. And I wonder how many other St. Louisans possess that same gap in their knowledge of local history. It’s a hole that director Joseph Puleo seeks to fill with his documentary […]

Review: “Trains”

Trains opens with a quote by Franz Kafka: “There is plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope…but not for us.” Those are characteristically bitter words from the Jewish Czech writer, attributed to a conversation between Kafka and his writer friend Max Bond when the latter asked the former his thoughts on hope outside the […]

Review: “Chain Reactions”

What more can you say about a movie so iconic that there’s seemingly nothing new to be said? That sentiment doesn’t deter Alexandre O. Philippe, whose essay films encompass cinematic topics ranging from the obvious (David Lynch’s obsession with The Wizard of Oz, Kim Novak’s role in Vertigo) to the niche (the iconography of Monument […]

Review: “Megadoc”

“I built my career following Francis,” George Lucas states in new interviews conducted by Mike Figgis for his documentary Megadoc, a fly-on-the-wall chronicle of director Francis Ford Coppola’s epic Megalopolis, his decades-gestating, self-financed dream project that— following a lengthy and fraught production— finally premiered at Cannes last year to largely critical pans and mass confusion. […]

Review: “Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale”

Fifteen years, six seasons, 52 episodes, and 3 feature films later, change has finally arrived at Downton Abbey. It’s an inevitable fact of existence that the series, which opened with the 1912 sinking of the Titanic and now concludes (presumably) in 1930, the start of a decade rife with worldwide turmoil, has acknowledged while nonetheless […]

Venice 2025: “La Grazia”

Who owns our days? That question is posed by Dorotea (Anna Ferzetti) to her father, Mariano De Santis, the President of the Italian Republic (Toni Servillo), about a quarter of the way through Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grazia, and— following the Italian filmmaker’s established pattern— is repeated several more times throughout the film’s runtime. Sorrentino has […]

Review: “Highest 2 Lowest”

It begins with a sweeping shots of the New York City skyline, just as that magic hour when the sun begins to peak over the horizon hits. The light dazzlingly reflects off the buildings, the water and windows of icons tall and small appearing gloriously warm as the strains of “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” […]

Review: “Sorry, Baby”

A few weeks ago, while rummaging around a cabinet in my office in search of a notepad with some blank pages that I could bring with me to the theater, I stumbled across a morbid little artifact: a thick notebook with gilt-edged pages and a soft, textured pink cover held in place by a metal […]

Review: “Catching Bullets”

In 2019, St. Louis, Missouri experienced the highest per capital murder rate of any city in the United States, a sobering statistic whose resolution was made all the more pressing by the fact that 13 of those deaths recorded over that summer were children. Within the first three hours of 2020, the city had already […]

Review: “Together”

Almost everything about Together— the debut feature from writer and director Michael Shanks— is precise. The formal rigor of its lore-heavy script. The perfectly matched leads in Dave Franco and Allison Brie, long-term partners in real life playing long-term partners on screen. The exquisitely-rendered visual effects, which are just squirm-inducing enough to make the audience […]