Beauty, we’re told, is in the eye of the beholder. There are some types of beauty that go beyond the subjective, however — the kind that stops traffic, turns modest men into Tex-Avery-style wolves and have entire feature films centered around them. This is the category that the title character …
Read More »'Armand' Is a Big Social-Commentary Swing With a Stellar Performance
It’s the laugh that gets you. Roughly halfway through Armand, the debut feature from Norwegian filmmaker Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel, we watch someone fall apart. A mother has been called into a parent-teacher conference. Her name is Elisabeth, she’s an actor of some renown, and is now largely associated with a …
Read More »'Companion' Resets the Concept of the Horror Rom-com
You do not want to read this review of Companion. Trust us. We only say this because writer-director Drew Hancock’s movie relies on more than a few secrets, and even though the film’s trailer more or less gives away a big one, we’re not keen on spoiling them just yeat. …
Read More »'Opus' Gives us John Malkovich, Pop Superstar
Back in the 1990s, there was no bigger musical superstar than Alfred Moretti. “Global” doesn’t begin to describe his level of fame. His particular brand of old-school glam rock, new-school electro-pop and sheer charisma meant he topped every chart imaginable. He reinvented genres, cavorted with presidents and popes, broke Cindy …
Read More »'Pee-wee as Himself' Would Like You to Meet the Man Behind the Bow Tie
The man staring into the camera is not Pee-wee Herman. He may look a little like him, kinda sorta sound like him, have that same sly, agent-of-chaos-reporting-for-duty-sir smirk. But he is not the man in the tight gray flannel suit, the one who went from cult-figure famous to beloved by …
Read More »'I'm Still Here' Is a Hell of a Showcase for a Brazilian Star
Established via a coup in 1964, the Fifth Brazilian Republic had been in place for close to seven years when government officials showed up at the house of Rubens Paiva. He had been a former Congressman who’d been vocal about the regime change back in the day, but Paiva was …
Read More »'Den of Thieves 2: Pantera' Is Not the Pulp Fiction You're Looking For
There’s an entire subgenre of modern crime movies you might call “Heat Rashes” — those heist thrillers that worship at the altar of Michael Mann’s 1995 stone-cold classic. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and the best and most admiring of these Mann-handlers is, by a huge margin, 2018’s …
Read More »'Hard Truths' Makes a Case for the Miserable — and Marianne Jean-Baptiste's Greatness
Everyone has a Pansy Deacon in their life, or has at least encountered someone a lot like her at their job, a get-together, or simply railing against something or someone in a public place. She’s the type of person to find a storm cloud behind every silver lining, to see …
Read More »Robert Eggers Wants to Resurrect the (Un)dead
Robert Eggers likes to go in cold. “In theory, I don’t care for this,” the soft-spoken 41-year-old filmmaker says, glancing around the hotel room he’s sitting in. “If I see a trailer for a movie made by a director I’m a fan of, or someone tells me about an obscure …
Read More »'Babygirl' Lets Nicole Kidman Get Her Kink On
Movies have been absolutely peerless when it comes to giving the world a chance to gaze at desirable females. What the seventh art has been notoriously bad at is exploring the concept of female desire, in all of its complexities and clandestine, dark-corner complications. This is where Babygirl comes in. …
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