It’s Walker Percy’s subversive strategy to stick us with a decided non-hero and have us gradually appreciate his non-participatory status.
Film Review: “Joker” — Here Come the Killer Clowns
Screenwriter-director Todd Phillips knows well what he is doing in the calculated way he escalates the bloodshed in Joker.
Film Review: A Rundown from the San Sebastian International Film Festival
How is this festival kept off the map from my US colleagues?
Film Review: “Love, Antosha” — A Poignant Tribute to Actor Anton Yelchin
This tender documentary makes an airtight case that cinema has lost a very special person.
Book Review: “The Earth Dies Streaming” — Insistent Originality
I happily read The Earth Dies Streaming through, all 433 pages of acute, often brilliant writing. And also often funny as hell.
Film Review: “Echo in the Canyon” — LA’s Land of the Giants
Echo in the Canyon is a sublimely moving documentary celebration of a nonpareil moment when, a half century ago, the Southern California scene boasted giants of music.
Film Review: Report from the 2019 Provincetown Film Festival
The P-Town Fest was the site of several first-rate documentaries.
Film Review: “The Souvenir” — Fear of Melodrama
Joanna Hogg refuses by aesthetic principle to put a lot of inflection into her scenes, steering them away from melodrama and even heated drama. As a result, some episodes are half-baked, sketchy, and flat.
Theater Review: Another View of “Indecent” — Flat and Obvious
In the case of a scene set in the Lodz Ghetto, the lineup of characters on the way to the concentration camps veered, for me, close to Holocaust porn.
Arts Remembrance: RIP Agnès Varda — The Most Important Woman Filmmaker Ever?
“The world is in very bad shape, but cinema in a way is a peaceful life.” — Agnès Varda