Reading Time: 6 minutes What is the margin between being good and being great? It’s something I’ve often thought about. It also seems to be preoccupation of every self-motivation video I see on Instagram, or misattributed quote on Twitter. There is an obsession with greatness, and yet so few people are able to achieve it. I believe it’s because […]
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Review roundup: ‘Row 19’ and ‘Firestarter’
Reading Time: 3 minutes As a child, Katerina was the sole survivor of a mysterious plane crash that left her motherless. She grows up to become a psychologist specializing in fear management (played by Svetlana Ivanova), and, as proof of mastery over her past, now embarks on a commercial flight with a moppet of her own in tow to […]
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Review: ‘Hit the Road’ is a sharp-witted directorial debut
Reading Time: 2 minutes There was a tweet by critic Matt Singer that made the Internet rounds earlier this month consisting of a screenshot of available showtimes for the AMC theater in Times Square, all for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. It’s a lot of showtimes. “This is not all of them,” Singer’s tweet reads, “I couldn’t […]
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‘Stanleyville’ thumbs nose at meritocracy, basically everything
Reading Time: 2 minutes Kisangani is a major commercial port city in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Under Belgian colonization it was known as Stanleyville, after Welsh-American explorer Henry Morton Stanley, of “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” fame. Stanley had been tapped by Belgian King Leopold II to establish a foothold for eventual annexation of the region. In 1897 […]
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Double-feature review: ‘The Northman’ and ‘Saturday Fiction’
Reading Time: 3 minutes Back in 1996, writers Andrew Strader and Nick Nicholas took a mildly funny running gag from Star Trek VI to the final frontier of nerdom by translating all of Shakespeare’s Hamlet into Klingon. Because wouldn’t it be hilariously incongruous if the warlike baddies from the original series (sorry, Worf) were also super invested in the […]
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Michael Bay excess finds worthy outlet in ‘Ambulance’
Reading Time: 3 minutes Following the Sam Raimi retrospective on the Blank Check podcast (they recently covered Army of Darkness) offers a renewed appreciation for Raimi’s madcap ingenuity. Film nerd legend has it that The Evil Dead lacked the funds for a camera dolly, so Raimi and crew constructed a wooden platform to slide a camera down that would […]
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‘Pig’ is a much needed post-Oscars palate cleanser
Reading Time: 2 minutes It’s depressingly apt that Michael Sarnoski’s feature debut Pig went overlooked at this year’s Academy Awards (and perhaps just as well—any hypothetical recognition would have been overshadowed by Will Smith physically assaulting a comedian). Pig is about the overlooked, the unnoticed, the forgotten. A doomed journey through the underbelly of a glittering, rotten industry, Portland’s […]
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Review: ‘X’ is an entertaining tour through cinema’s seedier backwaters
Reading Time: 3 minutes Ti West is good at silence. There’s a great sequence in his satanic panic flick The House of the Devil in which broke college student Samantha (Jocelin Donahue), having taken a suspicious “babysitting” job watching a very old woman upstairs, don’t even worry about it, dances around the living room of this not-empty house as […]
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Review: Leave the kids, watch the ‘2022 Oscar-Nominated Animated Shorts’
Reading Time: 3 minutes The thing that sucked about Quibi is that a streaming service dedicated to short films is honorable in theory. The short is a criminally undervalued art form, too frequently condescended to as mere launchpads to making “real movies.” Meshes of the Afternoon, La Jetée, World of Tomorrow, The House Is Black, and countless others are […]
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Review: Computer-generated ‘Earwig and the Witch’ lacks Studio Ghibli magic
Reading Time: 2 minutes Earwig and the Witch (hereafter Earwig) is the first fully computer-generated feature produced by Studio Ghibli, giving it instant curio status. Since the mid-1980s, the studio has specialized in traditional hand-drawn animation under the stern perfectionism of Hayao Miyazaki, who’s only sparingly relied on CGI for elaborate productions like Princess Mononoke. Miyazaki announced his retirement […]