The Tribeca Film Festival this year has been…weird. Naturally, certain changes were inevitable thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, but the festival’s scrambled response resulted in an unusual system where only major, triple-A publications were given access to their complete screener…
The Call of the Wild Movie Review: Misses the point of Jack London’s Novel
There’s something deeply, fundamentally perverse about filming a Jack London story with CGI animals—it’s akin to shooting a film version of James Joyce’s Ulysses on location…in Belfast. Everything that the novel stood for—the ego destruction of modernist man in the…
Olympic Dreams Movie Review: No finish line in sight
Former Olympian Alexi Pappas has all the makings of a great actress, if only someone could get her to stop acting. Throughout her new film Olympic Dreams, directed by long-time partner Jeremy Teicher, she’s perpetually on the edge of a…
Three Christs Movie Review: A treacly yet maudlin failure
There are two ways to approach Jon Avnet’s Three Christs, a drama based on the infamous 1959-1961 psychological study at Ypsilanti State Hospital where three paranoid schizophrenics who believed themselves to be Jesus Christ were made to live together. The…
The Discreet Wonder and Triumphant Majesty of Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life
In a small Austrian church hidden in the mountains, a wizened painter lifts brush to marble, restoring life and color to the frescos adorning the walls. He pauses and gazes upwards towards the gold-framed murals on the roof, designed to…
Movie Review: Nadav Lapid’s Synonyms is a Synonym for Pointlessness
If I had to choose one word to summarize Nadav Lapid’s French/Israeli immigrant drama Synonyms, it would be “inexplicable.” It’s a film inexplicable in its creative decisions, inexplicable in its narrative wanderings, and inexplicable in its critical popularity. This was…
Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman is a Towering, Tiring Meditation on Fatherhood, Love, and Grief
At a Q&A following a revival of Martin Scorsese’s Casino (1995) earlier this year in New York City, screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi explained that he saw Scorsese’s upcoming film The Irishman as the last in a quartet of gangster films starring…
