One of my favorite cinema stories is about KING KONG and the trouble it ran into with the censors even in that pre-Code time of 1933. It wasn’t Fay Wray in her slinky satin negligee, it wasn’t dinosaurs tearing each other apart. No, the only censored bit of KING KONG was the sound of Kong… Read More »
FUTURE ’38
There is a dividing line for those contemplating a viewing of FUTURE ’38. It has to do with wordplay. If you love puns you will be charmed by the whole-hearted impudence of this self-conscious parody. If not, best to move along, though you will miss a fine excursion into dead-pan drollery. As premise, we have… Read More »
INTENT TO DESTROY: DEATH, DENIAL, & DEPICTION
It comes across as a gimmick, using clips and behind-the-scene footage of 2017’s THE PROMISE to tell the story of the Armenian Genocide, and of Turkey’s ongoing campaign of denial about it. Yet, Joe Berlinger’s moving and maddening documentary, INTENT TO DESTROY: DEATH, DENIAL, & DEPICTION, is anything but a gimmick. By cutting and those… Read More »
PILGRIMAGE
PILGRIMAGE tells a dour tale of faith and fanaticism. Set in 13th-century Ireland, it blends mysticism with realpolitik in a time and place so distant from ours that a subtext of imperialism might be almost too subtle, while the vicious commonplaces of summary justice, revenge, and casual violence are all too vivid A prologue set… Read More »
DAVE MADE A MAZE
The search for meaning has never been more puckishly considered than in DAVE MADE A MAZE, an ingenious horror-fantasy-comedy of existential angst. Rife with metaphor and deadly origami come to life, it finds the time-space continuum falling victim to one man’s determination to finally finish something he started, and explores the deadly results of leaving… Read More »
COLUMBUS
Casey (Haley Lu Richardson) notes early on that one of the many architectural treasures of the titular COLUMBUS features elements that are off-center, but are still in harmonious balance. It is, as with so much else in this emotionally explosive but soft-spoken film, an exquisitely realized metaphor. A tale of seeming opposites with surprising and… Read More »
LOST IN PARIS
The spirit of Jacques Tati is alive and well in LOST IN PARIS, a charming comedy of coincidences (or is it fate?). As stylized as it is heartwarming, it is an unexpected love story set against the magical backdrop of Paris, with every movement, from a roasted red pepper on the loose, to a love… Read More »
ANGKOR AWAKENS: A PORTRAIT OF CAMBODIA
Robert H. Lieberman’s ANGKOR AWAKENS: A PORTRAIT OF CAMBODIA asks difficult questions and provides answers that are as illuminating as they are troubling. His portrait of Cambodia is refracted through the genocide that was inflicted on it by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, a genocide that reduced the number of doctors in in a once prosperous… Read More »
PREVENGE
Written and directed with a suitably biting edge by star Alice Lowe, PREVENGE is a droll and razor sharp black comedy of a horror film that considers the terrors of pregnancy and the maternal instinct gone askew. Very askew. Lowe, with a perfect deadpan sense of purpose, wields her kitchen knife as an instrument of… Read More »
BUSTER’S MAL HEART
It becomes clear early on that at some point in Jonas’ life, he has taken leave of his senses. Or, rather, his world has come apart at the seams, and his mind has done its poor best to reconstruct it using odds and ends. Told in the not necessarily linear way that the mind operates… Read More »
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