Feature
For a film about death, Lila Avilés' "Tótem" is extraordinarily lived in.
Avilés' camera roams through the festive, cluttered gathering of an extended family as they prepare for a birthday celebration that evening. Watching it all is the 7-year-old Sol (Naíma Sentíes), whose father,...
The awards season norm has seen the nearly annual occurrence of at least one difference between the lineups of Best Director Oscar and the DGA Award nominees. In only five of the 76 years of the DGA Awards have the Guild nominations exactly mirrored their Academy Award counterparts.
This...
Words like "important" and "vital" are thrown around possibly a little too much in film criticism. It's not that we don't mean it — it's just that sometimes we (ok, I) can get a bit excited. And when watching and reviewing good films in real time, it's impossible to know what is yet to come....
Upon reading Cord Jefferson’s script for American Fiction (Orion Pictures/Amazon MGM Studios), editor Hilda Rasula said it was “clear from the get-go” that this was a film she deeply wanted to work on. “I believed in the story and his tone of writing, mixing comedy and drama. It was...
The near-future is bleak for the working class of London in "The Kitchen," a well-executed film about a familiar kind of urban dystopian nightmare. It is, ironically, sunnier than the Los Angeles of "Blade Runner," but the mood is as dire.
In this world, the have-nots are crammed together...
Secret agents and murderous assassins seem to lurk in increasingly mundane places.
Remember "The Accountant" with Ben Affleck? Or "The Tax Collector" with Shia LaBeouf? Or more recently, how about "The Bricklayer" with Adam Eckhardt? You probably don't — none of these films were exactly...
Rodrigo Prieto, ASC, AMC once again finds himself in the awards season conversation--this time for two movies that are as different from one another as anyone could imagine: Barbie (Warner Bros. Pictures) and Killers of the Flower Moon (Apple Studios). They are also on opposite...
"Freud's Last Session," starring Anthony Hopkins as Sigmund Freud, adds to a string of sterling late-chapter performances by the 86-year-old actor. He was the soul of "Armageddon Time," the reason to see "The Father" and the papal foil to Jonathan Pryce's Pope Francis in "The Two Popes." With...
Pain and trauma permeate Michel Franco's new drama " Memory, " about two lost souls who find surprising comfort in one another. Both Jessica Chastain's Sylvia and Peter Sarsgaard's Saul are hostage to their own minds, though in vastly different ways. Hers haunts her. His is failing rapidly. And...
Back when he was a freshman at Kent State, Blitz Bazawule read Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Color Purple” for an English literature class. “It stuck with me,” he shared, citing not only the book’s “brilliant poetry” but also that it marked the first time he had read “African...