Steven Soderbergh’s reputation as an iconic filmmaker who has retired and unretired multiple times seems contradictory when watching one of his new movies, not merely because the movie exists, but also because his work feels like the product of someone who is always moving, always trying, always doing. Much of his focus in the past…
Hot off its debut at the South by Southwest Film Festival comes Wildling, a horror-drama that focuses on a young girl named Anna (Bel Powley, “The Diary of a Teenage Girl”). Locked away in an isolated cabin since infancy, Anna only receives glimpses into the outside world through stories told by her Daddy (Brad Dourif,…
A part of the town of Edgartown, Massachusetts is a small island on the eastern end of Martha’s Vineyard known as Chappaquiddick. It’s famous because on July 18, 1969, a 1967 Oldsmobile carrying U.S. Senator Edward M. Kennedy (Jason Clarke, “Mudbound”), then 36, and Kennedy staffer Mary Jo Kopechne (Kate Mara, “Megan Leavey”), 28, plunged…
“Who are we if we can’t protect them?” Evelyn Abbott (Emily Blunt, “The Girl on the Train”) asks her husband Lee (John Krasinski, “13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi”) in one of the only scenes in A Quiet Place in which dialogue can even be heard. The “them” Evelyn is referring to are her…
It is a bold filmmaker who trusts film as film and allows the medium to communicate without recourse to exposition and dialogue. Such a filmmaker is Lynne Ramsey (“We Need to Talk About Kevin”), whose latest offering, You Were Never Really Here, is a brilliantly brutal assembly of image and sound that never displays any…
“Gantz” is a 37-volume manga series written and illustrated by Hiroya Oku from 2000-2013, whose worldwide distribution has sold an excess of over 20 million copies. Hallmarked by its sexual overtones and sadistically gory aesthetic in tandem with deep sociological, psychological and anthropological themes dissecting morality, it is considered one of the most controversial seinen…
Having already won an Academy Award for his short film “Helium,” director Anders Walter makes a strong feature film debut with I Kill Giants, a reasonably touching, visually captivating adaptation of Joe Kelly’s comic book series of the same name. The story centers around Barbara (Madison Wolfe, “The Conjuring 2”), a tenacious fifth grader who’s…
