Andrew Osborne
Top Ten lists are obviously subjective...so what makes a movie Best of 2015 material? For me, it's usually about some combination of the following: originality, degree of difficulty, consistency of execution, and indelibility. Is it a film I keep thinking ...
Renata Polt
It turns out that murdering six million Jews takes a lot of work. Herding them off the trains; persuading them that the gas chambers are really shower rooms; removing the bodies after the killing; burning them; getting rid of the ...
George Wu
Michael Moore makes me embarrassed to recommend his new movie “Where to Invade Next.” By now, Moore’s snarky ragamuffin caricature is every bit his trademark as Charles Chaplin’s Little Tramp was his, but the former is ...
Beekeepers in the Tuscan countryside confront reality TV
Paula Farmer
I’ve never described a film as rustic, but for the film, it’s appropriate. “The Wonders” is also simple, unflattering and straightforward, yet interesting and compelling. It is a story about a family of beekeepers who live in the ...
Dan Schneider
Sometimes it is a tough thing to decide, how to lead off a review of a work of art that simply is not good. In the case of the latest Blu-Ray release from The Criterion Collection, ...
Emily S. Mendel
Writer and Director Amy Berg (“Deliver Us from Evil,” “West of Memphis”) has presented us with a wonderful holiday gift — an intimate documentary that chronicles of the life of one of rock’s most celebrated and talented stars of the ...
Renata Polt
San Francisco Bay Area silent film fans won't have to wait until summer to get their fix: "A Day of Silents," a one-day, five-film orgy of non-talkies, will be held at San Francisco's Castro ...
Emily S. Mendel
It was disheartening to read in the “Trumbo” publicity that the anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s, including the now-reviled House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), was a “forgotten piece of history.”
On the other hand, ...
George Wu
With “The Forbidden Room,” Guy Maddin, co-directing with his former student Evan Johnson, has managed to out-Maddin even his usual maniacal, evocative, psychosexual, non sequitur-laden style. The film opens with a guy in a bathrobe, Marv ...
George Wu
“The Assassin” is exactly what you would expect from a Hou Hsaio-hsien wuxia film, if you ever expected a Hou Hsiao-hsien wuxia film at all – it’s not much fun. Which isn’t to say it doesn’t ...
