Cannes Journal: ‘The Wild Pear Tree’
You need to know what you’re getting into when you settle down for a film by Nuri Bilge Ceylan. First, you’re in for the long haul – his latest, ‘The Wild Pear Tree’, runs 188 minutes. Second, you’re ...
Poll: What Did You Think of ‘Solo’?
Because we ran our review of ‘Solo: A Star Wars Story‘ about a week and a half before the movie opened, we neglected at that time to include a reader poll. Let’s rectify that now. Did you like the movie? Did you ...
Cannes Journal: ‘Ash Is Purest White’
Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke’s latest movie, ‘Ash Is Purest White’, continues to mine many of the themes that have characterized his films over the last several decades. He once again collaborates with his muse ...
Cannes Journal: ‘Donbass’
‘Donbass’, the latest from Germany-based Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa, leaves audiences with a lot to process. Told through a series of a dozen or so vignettes, the film takes an excoriating look at events that d...
Cannes Journal: ‘Border’
I’m aware that critics say this about films all the time, but the less you know about ‘Gräns’ (a.k.a. ‘Border’) the better. It’s a quirky, strange, often delightful mix of genres made all the mo...
‘Westworld’ 2.06 Recap: “We’re Not at Ful
Barring an unexpected payoff later in the season, last week’s diversion into Shogun World seems more and more to have been a fruitless waste of time. ‘Westworld’ (mostly) extracts us from that storyline this week...
Cannes Journal: ‘The Man Who Killed Don Quixote’
The term “quixotic” refers to the exceedingly impractical and unrealistic. Some quests speak to notions of romantic, adventurous reaching-to-the-stars simultaneously with a ridiculous, near lunatic denial of the very r...
Cannes Journal: ‘Under the Silver Lake’
In 2014, David Robert Mitchell’s slow-build ‘It Follows’ played the Critics’ Week selection at the Cannes Film Festival and took the genre world by storm. There was of course big anticipation for his return...
Cannes Journal: ‘Whitney’
There are two competing visions of Whitney Elizabeth Houston. The first is the angelic singer, part of a near dynastic family of soul singers who exploded onto the pop charts in the 1980s and set the style for generations of perfo...
Blu-ray Highlights: Week of May 27th, 2018 – Adorned with G
On this rather slow holiday week, new Blu-rays are headlined by a movie that almost didn’t get released at all.
Weekend Roundtable: Replacing an Icon
Alden Ehrenreich has his work cut out for him taking over the role of Han Solo. Stepping into the shoes of an iconic movie or TV character is a tricky proposition that risks the wrath of fans if not captured perfectly. This week, ...
Cannes Journal: ‘Capernaum’
It’s perhaps too simplistic to compare Lebanese director Nadine Labaki’s ‘Capernaum’ to last year’s Cannes smash ‘The Florida Project’, but since both films deal with the insidious nature ...