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 tha…
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,…
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 thems…
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-fr…
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 narr…
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…
The Film Canon – My Fair Lady (1964)
By the mid 1960s, U.S. cinema was in crisis. Every year, more and more viewers drifted away from the silver-screened cineplexes for the comforting glow of their own living rooms. Shows like Gunsmoke, …