Canadian iconoclast Guy Maddin has been making strange, surreal films that evoke the images and storytelling traditions of silent movies for decades. The Forbidden Room (2015), which he co-directed with his former student Evan Johnson, is like a compendium of his obsessions and cinematic fetishes. It opens on a mock-instructional film on “How to Take […]
Spike Lee weaves a familiar call through Chi-Raq (2015), his polarizing portrait of violence on Chicago’s South Side. Wake up. It’s been a cry and a plea since his first studio feature, School Daze (1998), and it’s particularly resonant in a film about black-on-black gang violence in Chicago, where more Americans have been murdered in […]
The rich, brutal, cynical culture of Italian westerns (aka spaghetti westerns) is dominated by Sergio Leone’s great movies and especially The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), arguably the definitive spaghetti western. But there is a whole legacy of cynical, hard-edged, and even politically daring Italian westerns of the sixties and seventies. You can […]
Happy 2016. Here are a few of the recent arrivals on Netflix, Amazon, and the rest of the streaming and VOD services. Netflix Keira Knightley is the headstrong and feisty Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, the 2005 adaptation of Jane Austen’s classic novel of love, class and social convention. Matthew Macfadyen is the starchy […]
Queen of Earth (2015), Alex Ross Perry’s follow-up to his breakout feature Listen Up Philip, is much more intimate character drama. Elisabeth Moss, who was the neglected and betrayed girlfriend in Philip, takes the lead here as a Catherine, a young woman reeling from the sudden death of her father at the same time as […]
The disturbed world of pulp crime novelist Jim Thompson’s deformed psyches and demented morality comes to life in This World, Then the Fireworks (1997), one of the more unpredictable works in a career defined by the author’s disturbingly treacherous tales. What makes this dreamy adaptation by director Michael Oblowitz and screenwriter Larry Gross work is […]
Richard Gere produces as well as stars in Time Out of Mind (2014) as George, a homeless and quite possibly mentally ill man in Manhattan getting lost in the bureaucratic maze of social services while bouncing from shelter to shelter in an effort to find some stability. Clearly the subject matter compels him—Gere’s activism is […]
A faithful remake, a spirited updating, and a deft, colorful, thoroughly entertaining heist film swimming in character and atmosphere, Neil Jordan’s The Good Thief (2002), his reworking of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob Le Flambeur, may not be his best film, but it is one of his most purely enjoyable. The payoffs are many: Nick Nolte’s shaggy performance […]
Everyone is familiar with the landmark horror classics. This is one in a series of suggestions for Halloween viewing that may not be so familiar, including titles that teens and tweens (and in some cases adolescents) can watch without breaking the R-rating. In the midst of making their classic Christmas specials (like Rudolph the Red […]
Beasts of No Nation, the harrowing drama of a child soldier in West Africa, is directed by Cary Fukunaga (who helmed the first season of True Detective) and stars Idris Elba as a brutal rebel leader. It earned rave reviews on the film festival circuit earlier this year and was snapped up by Netflix, which […]
