Holding Out for A Hero
In the wake of Iran’s phony election of 2009 that re-installed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president, the country cracked down on its filmmakers, so Abbas...
Marvels: Tag Team
Let me draw your attention to one thing about The Marvels. It’s the running time, a crisp 100 minutes even including the mid-credit sequence...
Blood and Snow
Since Bram Stoker’s Dracula was published 110 years ago, doing something new with vampires in any storytelling medium has gotten to be extremely difficult.
The...
Korean Killer
It’s been a while, hasn’t it? By all rights, Parasite’s Oscar win for Best Picture should have started a flood of Korean movies into...
Apollo 18: Stuck in Orbit
The “found-footage” subgenre of horror movies is pretty hit and miss. For every The Last Exorcism, there’s a Diary of the Dead (sorry, Romero...
Mars Express: Red Planet Revolt
I wasn’t looking for a French update of Ghost in the Shell, but now that one is playing this weekend at AMC Grapevine Mills,...
Turn Out the Lights?
Are music corporations, with their emphasis on repetitive, easy-to-swallow sounds, quashing musical innovation? Are listeners demanding dumbed-down music? Is good music dead?
Several years ago,...
Saturday Night: The Show Must Go On
Pauline Kael once described a film she reviewed as “coitus interruptus going on forever,” and that phrase came to mind when I was watching...
F for Fake
In interviews and public appearances, Richard Gere has repeatedly said that the most fun he has ever had on the job was playing Billy...
A Better Life, Mi Hijo
I remember watching Gregory Nava’s drama El Norte for my high-school Spanish class. I thought about that film while I was watching A Better...
