A disembodied melody punctured by sharp whispers; the resounding voice of Lady Galadriel demands your attention to the darkened screen. The commencement of arguably the best adapted fantasy series ever has begun — that is, 20 years ago. Sunday, Dec. […]
2001. Wikipedia and BitTorrent launch. Apple introduces iTunes and the iPod. Rudy Giuliani is Time’s Person of the Year. Britney dons a python. The kids won’t shut up about Harry Potter, and your brother won’t shut up about Ocean’s 11. […]
We’re in a pandemic, in case you haven’t noticed. And in a pandemic, especially as the parent of a toddler, time (to put a fine point on it) gets a bit — slippery. So on this past rather innocuous Tuesday […]
Kitty Green’s The Assistant is currently playing at FilmScene on the Ped Mall for the next two weeks. Papercuts are not the only wounds that sear in Green’s masterful and mesmerizing feature film The Assistant (2020). Some hurts are untraceable, […]
“You will believe,” promised the first trailer for Tom Hooper’s Cats, the film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s stage musical, itself adapted from T.S. Eliot’s collection of poems Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. There was something ominous, perhaps even mildly threatening about this tagline. What will we believe? That the strangest Broadway hit of all time would make a good movie? […]
All of Hollywood is nursing a hangover, so you know what that means: It’s the Monday after the Academy Awards! After a disappointing 2019 Oscars (including a Best Picture winner that was more than a little controversial) and a slate of 2020 nominees rife with snubs, cinephiles’ were tempered last night […]
Perhaps more than any of the other 23 categories, the Oscar-nominated Animated Shorts come with the promise of fresh, risk-taking perspectives. The medium of animation is truly limitless, and for being so constrained within the mainstream, there is something liberating to view the artistic shorts explore, push and reinvent themselves for the betterment of their own narratives. […]
Nathan rushes Theresa to the hospital, leaving their children at home to fend for themselves. But the television is all static. The cell phone signals are scrambled. Time is incongruous, no longer adhering to linearity or logic. Something sinister is brewing … […]
I want to gush about Parasite, which opens at FilmScene—The Chauncey today, but it’s one of those movies where the less you know going in, the better. Still, while you’re here, I think there are a few things I can say about Bong Joon-ho’s latest masterpiece that will, hopefully, entice you to go see it without diminishing that experience for you. […]
Nazis are bad, right? Right. Taiki Waititi assumes you already understand this if you’re sitting down to watch his latest film, Jojo Rabbit. If you know anything about this movie, it’s that it’s about a kid who has Adolf Hitler as an imaginary friend. Maybe you even heard that it’s directed by the Thor: Ragnarok guy. Oh, and it’s divisive as hell. […]
‘Lucy in the Sky’ (dir. Noah Hawley) opens with astronaut Lucy Cola (Natalie Portman) looking from the outside to the world she left behind. It appears as a sphere strung with lights of connection. She’s told to come in, but she asks for another moment. The vast vista is exchanged for a view from earth, a fast-moving amalgam of cars and faces and
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In ‘Monos,’ the lack of a centralized, framing point of view, the young children who lack a fixed identity and the absence of much context make the film difficult to predict. Choices that lead to unexpected consequences are less revelations of character than witnesses to forces that alter our sense of what life and survival mean. […]
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Rec'd 2023
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