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When I first watched Hamnet, it felt like a car crash on slow motion. It felt like Chloé Zhao the director was forcing me to watch the aftermath of the crash, slowly and mercilessly making me relive an undeniable fear, a putrid sense of despair, focusing on how a child’s death destroys a family, shatters […]
Somewhere between the reality of what has happened and what we believe to be the truth is the story we want to have happened. Every biopic of a widely beloved figure toes the line between hagiography and fan fiction. Tony is no different. It’s both things and it’s something else. There’s no right way to […]
What’s hot at Montreal’s great genre festival? Some true vanguard filmmaking and ten films we recommend watching: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma Jane Schoenbrun is an emergent voice in indie cinema and our present best purveyor of identity-driven film. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, like Jane’s past work, opts for a […]
Horror is the deepest genre bucket. A good horror movie can be just about anything. It’s a ready-made, adaptable genre wherein filmmakers get to experiment. When it’s attached to a big franchise, those filmmakers are given free reign, to make the movie and story they want, with the upside of a preinstalled audience, and quick […]
Naïveté stirs itself into hyper-optimism in Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day. Spielberg — a talented filmmaker who could be the next M. Night Shyamalan — returns to blockbuster filmmaking with a hope-pilled dream of alien encounters. Disclosure Day is about aliens, which it earns, and the monocultural reverence of legacy media, which it cannot earn, and […]
Whether it’s seven dwarfs, psychopaths, samurai, snipers, or itchy years, the seventh digit is numerically well represented in cinema. The cinematic salience of seven is a simple matter of symbolism. The number stands out and makes us wonder about the items contained — if it’s an odd number, it often refers to an odd collection […]
It’s time to consider some features. Hen György Pálfi may be one of Hungary’s best working filmmakers — his early features Hukkle (2002) and Taxidermia (2006) were selected as Hungary’s Oscars submissions — but the director has now shifted to making films in Greece over political disagreement with the Hungarian National Film Institute. And now […]
Making Charles Portis’ classic Western revenge novel True Grit (1968) into an intergalactic Comic Book Movie necessarily means that we are viewing it through the prism of an adaptation of an adaptation. Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow (2021-2022) is an inversion of that classic story, wherein the main character of Supergirl fulfills the Rooster Cogburn part […]
It’s time to consider some documentaries. Eight Bridges “It’s time to consider some bridges,” is a front-runner for best tagline of the year, because it really is time to consider some bridges. There are eight of them herein. Eight ten-or-so minute extended shots of bridges existing as they are. Delightful architectural functionality, ready for your […]
A smorgasbord of shorts, introducing eclectic new voices to Seattle’s beloved film festival. This year’s selections have wide-ranging aesthetics, deeply personal stories, and play with the form and function of the short film in invigorating ways. Let’s dive right in! Acid City (Brave New World) Abstract rotoscoping showcase wherein the citizens of a city in […]
