If Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In was “a horror story without screams or frights,” then Julieta is a thriller without thrills or tension. The story gradually builds to a mystery surrounding a disappearance whose cause is hinted at,…
Movie Review: SiREN
There are a surprising number of good ideas in Gregg Bishop’s SiREN, especially for a film that’s a feature-length adaptation of Amateur Night, one of the short segments from the infamous horror anthology V/H/S (2012). Abandoning the short film’s three-buddies-shoot-an-amateur-porno…
Movie Review: Mifune: The Last Samurai
Steven Okazaki’s Mifune: The Last Samurai is a perfectly serviceable documentary on the great Japanese actor Toshirô Mifune if you aren’t looking for any information you couldn’t find on the man’s Wikipedia page. Those wanting a more penetrative look into…
Movie Review: The Windmill
I was honestly going to give Nick Jongerius’s The Windmill a good review. It’s a slasher film, but despite much critical bickering, that in itself is no sin. And while it gleefully indulges in wanton splatter—heads crush like melons under…
Movie Review: Theo Who Lived
Formally, David Schisgall’s documentary Theo Who Lived breaks fairly little new ground. Taking cues from other documentaries ranging from Werner Herzog’s Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997) and Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012), Schisgall reconstructs the two-year imprisonment…
NYFF Review: The Lost City of Z
When Werner Herzog traveled into the Amazon rainforest, he found chaos and madness. But when James Gray ventured into it for his film The Lost City of Z, he found poetry and purpose. Based on David Grann’s book of the…
