In Dead Man’s Wire, a very angry individual takes a bank manager hostage and hooks him up to a shotgun-on-a-wire. Based on a true story and directed by Gus Van Sant, the movie is a well done if somewhat tedious crime-thriller. The movie, set in 1977, has Bill Skarsgaard playing Tony Kiritsis, an agitated man … Read more
Now available on Digital If you view If I Had Legs I’d Kick You as escapist entertainment, you must have the perfect life. A descent into manicism through the eyes of a spiraling therapist, the movie is an immersive, anxiety-inducing thrill ride headlined by an Oscar-worthy performance by Rose Byrne. Byrne, one of today’s best … Read more
A day after suffering through one of the worst movies of the year, I was able to watch one of the best: Marty Supreme, a fast-paced, unpredictable, anxiety-fueled, and funny drama of sorts from the mind of Josh Safdie. Similar to Uncut Gems and Good Time, and thankfully not at all like his brother’s movie … Read more
When Robert De Niro radically transformed his body to play the boxer Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull, it meant he was serious about his craft, and reshaped our understanding of authenticity in acting. What does it mean that Sydney Sweeney transformed hers, gaining an easily googleable quantity of pounds of muscle mass, to play the boxer … Read more
It’s as if Jalmari Helander listened to my critiques of 2022’s Sisu. His followup, the explosive Sisu: Road to Revenge, improves on the original in just about every way. An absolute banger from start to finish, Road to Revenge is violent, gory, and utterly satisfying, even if it didn’t need to be as over-the-top ridiculous … Read more
Although based on the 2020 novel ‘Box Hill’ by Adam Mars-Jones, Harry Lighton’s Pillion is mostly unrecognisable from its source material, retaining only a few crucial details. Gone is the 1970s Surrey setting, along with the first-person narration and reckoning with queer identity at the height of the AIDS crisis. Kept are the names – Colin … Read more
Available on Digital on December 9, 2025 I wish Osgood Perkins would make a great movie. The dude seems to make a dozen horror movies a year, many of them worthwhile, but he has yet to make one that is start-to-finish great. Keeper, unfortunately, is the latest sign that the filmmaker has an eye for … Read more
Like her short La Bouche De Jean-Pierre (1996) and her features Innocence (2004), Evolution (2015) and Earwig (2021), Lucile Hadžihalilović’s latest, The Ice Tower, offers an unnerving, surreal take on a young person’s coming of age. It begins with a female voiceover narrating part of Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Snow Queen’, accompanied by a fragmented kaleidoscope of snow-globe … Read more
The vainglory of peacocking despots is captured with sardonic wit and homespun creativity in this clever re-staging of a crackpot coup attempted by the Italian poet, aviator and fascism early-adopter, Gabriele d’Annunzio. Croatian filmmaker Igor Bezinović establishes early on that this is a pocket of military history that not many people know of, including the residents of … Read more
The accusation of “all style, no substance” gets thrown around often, sometimes appropriately, but what about a film that has neither style nor substance, no matter how much it tries to sell that it has both? Wicked: For Good is that picture, one that probably wouldn’t exist if not for the hubris of everyone involved in its creation. … Read more