Quick question: Have you seen The Man From U.N.C.L.E.? We don’t mean the popular TV show of the 1960s, in which Robert Vaughn and David McCallum surfed the era’s espionage-a-go-go wave and brought big Bond-style adventure to the little screen every week. We’re talking about the 2015 movie that wanted …
Read More »'The Quiet Girl' Is One of the Most Heartbreaking Movies in Ages
The girl is named Cáit. She’s 12 years old, doesn’t like attention, stays hidden and silent when she can. Living in the rural Irish countryside in the early 1980s, she’s the youngest of a brood belonging to parents that seem one perpetually short fuse away from exploding. Or rather, she …
Read More »'Return to Seoul' Is One of the Best Identity-Crisis Movies Ever
“Do you know what sight-reading is?” a young woman asks her dining companions. Neither of them know, so she explains: When you look over a score for the first time, “you have to able to analyze the music in one glance, evaluate the danger… and jump in.” The key is …
Read More »'Fair Play': Sundance's Dirty, Sexy $20 Million Hit That Seduced Netflix
You can call Fair Play a lot of things: a finance-industy psychodrama about paying the cost to be the boss, a treatise on power dynamics in relationships, the surprise hit out of Sundance’s first weekend and the film festival’s first big-ticket sales item. (How Netflix plans on recouping its $20 …
Read More »'Sick': 'Scream' in the Time of Covid
Give Kevin Williamson credit: The screenwriter behind the Scream series isn’t afraid to recycle his greatest hits. His new addition to the slasher-film canon opens on a young man named Tyler (Joel Courtney) wandering the aisles of a cleaned-out supermarket. It’s April 3rd, 2020. Covid-19 cases are exponentially rising. Most …
Read More »Pam Grier Has a Chain Saw and She Isn't Afraid to Use It
There are all other legends, and then there is Pam Grier. She became the first and greatest Black female action hero of the Seventies, in blaxploitation classics like Coffy and Foxy Brown. She reigns as one of the all-time iconic Hollywood stars, from her Quentin Tarantino collaboration Jackie Brown to …
Read More »'No Bears' Is a Funny, Angry Work of Protest Art — and a Masterpiece
For most filmmakers, picking up a camera is a form of expression. For Jafar Panahi, it’s an act of political resistance. Having been arrested several times (as recently as July of this year), prohibited from traveling and officially banned from filmmaking since 2010 by the Iranian government, the Tehran-based director …
Read More »'The Menu' Serves Up the Last Supper of Class Warfare
Reservations at Hawthorne are notoriously hard to get. It only seats 12 guests (at $1250 a head) and does a single multi-course dining service per evening. Located on an island that also houses the staff and provides the bulk of the ingredients, it’s considered the best dining experience in the …
Read More »Meet Quentin Tarantino: Film Critic
Before he was a superstar auteur, a Royale-with-Cheese rock star, the divisive and worshiped motormouth who launched a thousand dissertations and 10 times as many Film Twitter flame wars, Quentin Tarantino was a movie fanatic. It pays to remember this fact — not that the raconteur would ever let you …
Read More »The Neo-Nazi Karens of 'Soft & Quiet' Could Be Your Neighbors. That's What Makes Them Terrifying
“I just entered the country with derringers ‘Cause them Karens just turned into terrorists.” — “Energy,” Beyonce There’s something about Emily (Stefanie Estes) that strikes you as being just a little off. Maybe it’s the edginess emanating from this tall, blond woman when we first meet her, though to be …
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