There is a moment early in Kenneth Branagh’s intricately constructed adaptation of Agatha Christie’s classic whodunnit when Hercule Poirot (Branagh) stands on the deck of a ship as it leaves Istanbul. Poirot is captured center frame: The deck, the railing, the adjacent cabin and the sea itself are balanced perfectly around him. The shot is…
A sheep in wolf’s clothing — by which I mean a B-movie in Euro-arthouse clothing — The Unseen shoulders its way into the dynasty of slow-burn horror films about middle class parents escaping to some distant place to cope with the grief of losing a child. Writer-director Gary Sinyor has a history of lightweight rom-coms…
I’ll start my review for Wonderstruck like this: If Wonderstruck doesn’t get a nomination for best picture this year then something is horribly wrong. It’s hard to imagine — and I haven’t yet seen — another 2017 film that equals or tops it. Todd Haynes, a director known for bringing queer cinema to the mainstream…
To describe what breed of horror movie Somebody’s Darling is would be a spoiler in itself. Suffice to say, it’s small-scale, slow-burning, strange and sometimes surreal. It’s also very good. The setting is Williamsburg University, in 2006. History student Sarah (Jessa Settle, “Accidentally Engaged”) and her bitchy buddies arrive at a frat party and find…
The digital age is slickly skewered on the sharp blade of a knife that cuts a clean swath of revenge through a wealthy family’s existence in sick satirist Yorgos Lanthimos’ genre-blurring The Killing of a Sacred Deer. Lanthimos buries his satirical observations deep and then brushes away select portions of the surface to reveal grim…
Suburbicon, the worst and even worse timed movie of the year, feels like someone put “Pleasantville,” “Fargo,” and the Vault Tech initiation videos from the Fall Out video game franchise into a blender in a grotesque, heavy on the white-splaning approximation of the recipe for “Do the Right Thing.” The resulting slop, entirely missing ingredients…
In some ways, Theresa “Tree” Gelbman (Jessica Rothe, “Wolves”) is your average college student. She parties, she drinks, and, at the end of the night, she doesn’t always end up at home. In other ways she’s your average sorority girl (the pathetically one dimensional way sororities are portrayed in movies, at least). She maintains shallow…
