The start of 76 Days, the latest from documentary filmmaker Hao Wu along with Weixi Chen and their anonymous co-director, is something out of a horror movie. First it’s the haunting sobs of a medical …
Quentin Tarantino Comes Home in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
It’s been almost 30 years since Quentin Tarantino first hit the indie scene like a neutron bomb with his debut feature Reservoir Dogs (1992) and since then he’s made many names for himself. To some he…
Phil Movie Review: An inoffensive but unfunny take on a heavy subject
One must tread carefully with suicide; it’s a subject that demands delicacy and nuance. When handled sloppily it can tear open old wounds from those who’ve lost loved ones that way. Or, even worse, it…
Jordan Peele’s Us is a Well-Intentioned Misfire
[This review contains some spoilers] One can scarcely imagine the pressure on Jordan Peele when the time came to begin shooting his sophomore feature film Us following the enormous success of his debu…
The Juniper Tree (4K) Movie Review: A Starkly Dream, Revivified
Among the pantheon of toe-chopping, head-slicing stepmothers in the Brothers Grimm’s fairy-tale canon, few are as starkly cruel and vicious as the one in The Juniper Tree. Here, an abusive stepm…
A Great Lamp, and the Salvation of Camaraderie Through Cinema
In early 2017, director Saad Qureshi called his friend Donald Monroe and confessed he was feeling suicidal. “Donald,” he pleaded, “if we don’t make a film right now, I’m going to kill myself.” Donald,…
‘Beautiful Boy’ Review: Timothée Chalamet Astonishes in Painful, Messy and True Story About Addiction
Early in Felix Van Groeningen’s Beautiful Boy, based on the best selling novels by David and Nic Sheff, David (Steve Carrell) is told that relapse is to be expected in addiction recovery –…