In the film, Sweet Country, set in the bleak Northern Territory of Australia of the 1920s, there is a brief interchange between a hard-working, though weary and aging Archie (Gibson John), an Aboriginal cattle hand, and a wayward teenage Aboriginal Philomac (played by the twins, Tremayne and Trevan Doolan). Archie lectures the boy about their…
Winner of the Silver Lion at the Venice International Film Festival and Israel’s submission to the 2018 Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film, Israeli director Samuel Maoz’s (“Lebanon”) brilliant and confounding Foxtrot reveals itself less by narrative than by images: A narrow road in an empty stretch of desert, a lonely camel meandering through a…
Director/co-writer Matt Spicer intriguingly meshes together a sharply insightful confection of deranged, alienated millennium-era feminine empowerment tweaked with disturbing, quirky overtones. The skillful and sardonically executed dramedy Ingrid Goes West is a smart, satirical and blistering commentary on youthful loneliness tied in the murky web of social media deception and obsession. Vastly witty and perceptive,…
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…
The specter of 90s cinematic cool looms over every frame of Killing Gunther, a darkly comic mockumentary action movie about goofball criminals that kill for laughs. It’s like a lost relic from a time when everyone wanted to rip off Tarantino and when the fake documentary approach still felt fresh. It also semi-stars Arnold Schwarzenegger…
History lessons don’t have to be boring. But when they are, the problem usually lies with the execution of the presentation of the information. This happens to be the unfortunate circumstance of accomplished writer-director Armando Iannucci’s latest film, The Death of Stalin, which takes a satirical look at the death of Josef Stalin and the…
Thoroughbreds has completely reinvented the concept of a haunted mansion, having mercifully put the former out to pasture and out of its misery. This particular mansion is home to Lily, a polished upper-class teenager with a fancy boarding school on her transcript, a coveted internship on her resume, and a penchant for short shorts and…
