In 1915, D. W. Griffith’s film “The Birth of a Nation” was released, en route to becoming one of the most influential and controversial films in cinema history. Griffith’s historical epic created indelible imprints on film content and style, particularly in the areas of racial representation and editing. A century later, Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman attempts…
I watched Support the Girls right on the heels of “We the Animals” and “Crazy Rich Asians,” and it requires no stretch of the imagination to view this coincidental triple-feature as three distinct and distinctive representations of the meaning and function of family. The employees of Double Whammies — particularly the young, attractive, well endowed…
The Nun, the fifth film in “The Conjuring” Universe, is a hugely flawed and underwhelming horror film that’s both plodding and formulaic. While the film, Corin Hardy’s sophomore directorial effort following 2015’s “The Hallow,” boasts convincing performances from scream queen Taissa Farmiga (“The Final Girls”) and Demián Bichir (“Alien: Covenant”), it fails to leverage its…
By virtue of shared history and experiences, siblings are pack animals, asking blind loyalty in return for fierce protection. They inspire imitation and a sort of “in it together”-ness. In Jeremiah Zagar’s first narrative feature, We the Animals, brothers Manny (Isaiah Kristian), Joel (Josiah Gabriel, “Night Comes On”), and Jonah (Evan Rosado) are likewise. They…
Tackling topics as trendy as gentrification, police brutality, and the post-prison life of convicted felons, there may not be a film more timely than Carlos López Estrada’s Blindspotting. Written by and starring Rafael Casal and “Hamilton” star Daveed Diggs, the film is as much a social observation of the aforementioned themes as it is a…
Two ex-convicts working at a dead-end diner are given an opportunity to change things around when a lawyer proposes a heist, unaware that larger antagonistic machinations are hard at work. While this plotline is fairly standard as far as heist capers are concerned, Hadi Hajaig has cranked the tonal voltage up to eleven by infusing…
German Angst is a movie for the “V/H/S,” “Zombieworld,” “The ABCs of Death” crowd in that it is technically a collection of three shorter films — “Final Girl,” “Make a Wish,” and “Alraune,” respectively — full of extreme violence and horrific fun. With “Final Girl” as a quiet, graphic, and personal revenge fantasy, “Make a…
