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,…
Tolkien Movie Review: Director Dome Karukoski misses the mark, and the magic
There’s an inspired moment about halfway through Dome Karukoski’s Tolkien where a young J. R. R. Tolkien (Nicholas Hoult) takes his future wife Edith Bratt (Lily Collins) to tea in a lavish restaurant…
Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice Tribeca Movie Review: A hollow exploration of a wondrous career
The first half of Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice is a maddening, frustrating sit, portraying Ronstadt—the woman who would go multiplatinum several times, win …
Film Review: ‘At the Heart of Gold’ is a Necessary Autopsy and a Grim Warning
[Warning: This review contains descriptions of sexual assault] One of the most shocking revelations in Erin Lee Carr’s documentary At the Heart of Gold, a chilling expose of the 2016-2017 USA gymnasti…
Furie (Hai Phuong) Movie Review: A Vietnamese bone-crunching visual delight
Hai Phuong hurts people for a living. A debt collector in rural Can Tho, she earns her keep beating up pig farmers and street grocers who missed their payments to loan sharks. When she fight…
The Quake Movie Review: Norway’s New Disaster Film Barely Registers on the Richter Scale
In 2015, Roar Uthaug The Wave made waves—pun not intended—as the self-proclaimed first ever Scandinavian disaster movie. Borrowing heavily from the Roland Emmerich playbook, it followed the fate of a …
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is a Violent, Heart-breaking Old West Meditation on Mortality
Death has always been a punchline for Joel and Ethan Coen. Its suddenness, its finality, its nihilistic impartiality—these anxieties have flooded their films since their very first, 1984’s Blood Simpl…