Film
Spoiler Alert is arranged to make the viewer feel snug, like a cup of hot cocoa on a cold winter day.
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Some might consider Close to be a depressing film, but its impressive understanding of human frailty and the power of forgiveness is revelatory.
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Two horror-adjacent films at this year’s Sundance Festival — Sorcery and Animalia — were strikingly beautiful.
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Rather than coming across as angry or urgent, Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s No Bears feels muted, perhaps even subdued to the point of depression.
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One Fine Morning lives up to its sunny title, even if it’s a bit less optimistic than you might expect.
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Beyond Utopia is a grim reminder that, against growing odds, people keep leaving North Korea, or try to. It may be a while before another family agrees to film the journey out.
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My second crop of Sundance screenings features three films that are all about women who, on some level, retreat from certain aspects of their lives: their pasts, their trauma, their public persona.
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Kim’s Video is quixotic in a nutty way — in an old Indie style — that is more refreshing than it is nostalgic.
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In Infinity Pool, people who are dead inside essentially play with their own corpses as shiny, new toys. The savagery of that idea is, simply, delicious.
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Flipping a Coin: The Significance of Anna May Wong’s Quarter
What emerges from even a cursory study of Anna May Wong’s life is that her complexity and depth were rarely acknowledged but she used her intelligence to control the narrative as much as she could.
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