Rating: 3.5★
By the early 1990s, Batman: The Animated Series had already done something rather unusual: it had convinced a generation of children, and more than a few adults, that a Saturday-morning cartoon could be genuinely moody, even emotionally serious. The series arrived in 1992 with its own aesthetic language, a
Rating: 4.0★
There is a particular kind of American film that Hollywood occasionally stumbled into during the 1950s, almost by accident: modest in budget, intimate in scale, and completely unconcerned with spectacle. Marty (1955) is the purest example of the type. Produced by Hecht-Lancaster Productions, the independent outfit that Harold Hecht
Rating: 3.5★
Michael Mann has spent the better part of four decades making Los Angeles his own particular territory, and Collateral (2004) sits squarely in that tradition. Where Heat spread itself across the city in daylight and shadow over nearly three hours, this film compresses everything into a single night, a single
Rating: 0.5★
Harmony Korine has never been particularly interested in making audiences comfortable. The Kentucky-born writer and director first announced himself to the world as the teenage screenwriter of Larry Clark's Kids (1995), a film that rattled cages on both sides of the Atlantic, and he has spent the
Rating: 2.5★
Released in late 2019 and acquiring a wider profile in early 2020, The Assistant arrived at a particular cultural moment. The Harvey Weinstein scandal had broken in 2017, the Me Too movement had reshaped public conversation around workplace power, and the film industry was grappling, publicly if not always honestly,
Rating: 3.5★
H. G. Wells published The War of the Worlds in 1898, and the story has never quite left us alone since. Orson Welles sent radio listeners into a panic with his 1938 broadcast adaptation, Byron Haskin put it on screen in 1953, and Jeff Wayne turned it into a prog-
Rating: 4.0★
Taiwan has produced some genuinely singular genre cinema over the past two decades, from the quiet devastation of Edward Yang's realism to the visceral unease of films like The Sadness (2021), which I found about as punishing as horror gets. Dead Talents Society, arriving in 2024 and distributed
Rating: 4.5★
Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple (1985) arrives in his filmography as something of a pivot point, sandwiched between the rollicking adventure of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom the previous year and the science-fiction spectacle that bookended much of his early career. Based on Alice Walker&
Article
Marking Linda Hamilton at 70: a look back across Linda's career through the films I've reviewed.
Rating: 2.0★
The Oregon Trail has cast a long shadow over American mythology, and cinema has returned to it often enough to establish its own set of conventions: the wagon circle, the hostile horizon, the guide whose confidence outpaces his competence. Meek's Cutoff (2010) takes that familiar premise and strips
Rating: 3.0★
Terence Davies is one of British cinema's most singular voices, a filmmaker whose work sits at the uncomfortable crossroads of memory, faith, class and longing. Born and raised in Liverpool, he spent the early part of his career turning the landscapes and emotional textures of his childhood into
Rating: 3.0★
Spike Lee arrived at Inside Man in 2006 as something of a surprise package: a studio thriller from a filmmaker whose reputation had been built on personal, politically charged work, from the simmering tensions of Do the Right Thing to the jazz elegy of Mo' Better Blues. For those
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