Destroyer is a hardboiled bit of crime pulp that you’ve seen a thousand times before. Of course, the filmmakers know that and hope that the ingenuity comes in the telling and the details. Unfortunately, director Karyn Kusama’s app...
The Sisters Brothers is another contemporary Western that seems to exist purely to prove that the genre is still relevant while telling a story about the demise of the West. It all started with Peckinpah before Eastwood kept at it...
Decapitations, possessions, exploding everything, splatstick humor, and Monica Bellucci as the queen of the underworld… Nekrotronic seems like the sort of nerdy horror show guaranteed to please anyone who enjoys such things. Unfor...
Lock up your Lefties! Michael Moore is back and this time he’s got a documentary about a certain gentleman by the name of Donald J. Trump. Now, you might find this hard to believe, but Mr. Moore has a negative opinion of the Presi...
Lee Chang-dong’s Burning is an impressive piece of craftsmanship clearly filled with ambition. The film has scenes and sequences that instantly burn into the brain and an ever-escalating sense of tension that makes it impossible t...
Non-Fiction is the sort of movie that smart people like to watch to remind themselves that they are indeed intelligent without actually being challenged. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Entire studios and careers have been ded...
A few years ago, director Matteo Garrone burst into the international filmmaking scene with Gomorrah, an almost anthropological study of the crime syndicates in the crumbling working class communities of Naples. It was a gangster ...
Some people probably thought that three separate versions of A Star Is Born were enough. Not Bradley Cooper, though. He decided that the world needed yet another version of that timeless tale of one star being born and another bei...
Profoundly moving and unnerving in the gentlest of ways, Shoplifters is the type of quiet little movie that works best when playing to the unexpected. When the film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes last spring, it practically guarante...
It’s simple to pitch Firecrackers as “Canadian Honey,” a Canuck take on similar turf that Andrea Arnold covered with her celebrated (but flawed) 2016 drama American Honey. As films about fiery young women coming to terms with the ...
Canadian documentarian Ron Mann has had a long career shedding light on various subcultures, from his celebrated Comic Book Confidential, examining a dance craze in The Twist, to stoners and growers in Grass. His latest, Carmine S...
Some Japanese horror movies are achingly sincere and slow-burn to the point of tedium. ‘Vampire Clay’ is absolutely not one of those movies. Directed by makeup and effects artist Sôichi Umezawa, the film is an absolute romp and an...
