|
|
War Game
(2024)
|
Oscar Goff
|
It’s frankly terrifying stuff, and not recommended viewing immediately before bedtime.
Posted Aug 30, 2024
|
|
|
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
(2003)
|
Joshua Polanski
|
We took the Pirates of the Caribbean for granted and now we live with the consequences of our actions.
Posted Aug 29, 2024
|
|
|
Melchior the Apothecary
(2022)
|
Joshua Polanski
|
Think Paddington (2014), only he’s a sexy Estonian apothecary instead of a talking British bear.
Posted Aug 25, 2024
|
|
|
Strange Darling
(2023)
|
Oscar Goff
|
I quite enjoyed many elements of Strange Darling, but ultimately I found myself bouncing off the artifice of it all.
Posted Aug 23, 2024
|
|
|
Good One
(2024)
|
Oscar Goff
|
The so-called “awards season” doesn’t start for another month or so, but I feel confident in saying Collias delivers one of the best performances of the year.
Posted Aug 16, 2024
|
|
|
Girl You Know It's True
(2023)
|
Joshua Polanski
|
If the movie industry must continue with the old game of musician biopics, they should make more films like Girl You Know It’s True. It’s just not like the other ones, and sometimes creativity is all it takes to make a good movie.
Posted Aug 08, 2024
|
|
|
Kneecap
(2024)
|
Oscar Goff
|
Where so many musical biopics have the soulless pallor of a wax museum, Kneecap is bursting with life.
Posted Aug 02, 2024
|
|
|
Event Horizon
(1997)
|
Joshua Polanski
|
With inspirations varying from Hieronymus Bosch and Warhammer 40,000 to the literal architecture of the Notre Dame Cathedral and Fritz Lang, Paul WS Anderson’s ... Event Horizon [is] one of the great 20th-century space-horror films.
Posted Jul 22, 2024
|
|
|
Kati Kati
(2016)
|
Joshua Polanski
|
Kati Kati is remarkable for the amount of its achievement in such a limited runtime.
Posted Jul 19, 2024
|
|
|
Death Race
(2008)
|
Joshua Polanski
|
A full showcase of the director’s visual and thematic talents.
Posted Jul 19, 2024
|
|
|
Circus Columbia
(2010)
|
Joshua Polanski
|
[Danis] Tanović ... makes no effort to hide the film’s political workings... Tanović’s direction makes their hatred feel groundless and pathetic.
Posted Jul 19, 2024
|
|
|
Space Sweepers
(2021)
|
Joshua Polanski
|
Being flaunted as South Korea’s first space-opera, Space Sweepers (or Victory, in the English translation of the Korean title), is less operatic than myopic.
Posted Jul 19, 2024
|
|
|
Paper Lives
(2021)
|
Joshua Polanski
|
Çağatay Ulusoy’s performance sets the standard to beat for the best performing categories in awards season.
Posted Jul 19, 2024
|
|
|
Nobody
(2021)
|
Joshua Polanski
|
Nobody ... makes no false pretenses in its practical re-creation of the Wick franchise
Posted Jul 19, 2024
|
|
|
The Disciple
(2020)
|
Joshua Polanski
|
A beautiful Netflix original that takes seriously religious mysticism... [and] navigates the ephemeral and enchants the viewer in the process.
Posted Jul 19, 2024
|
|
|
Cruella
(2021)
|
Joshua Polanski
|
Whether or not this intensely directed style works here, it’s a welcomed change from the recent corporate-productional feel of the most recent crop of Disney films.
Posted Jul 19, 2024
|
|
|
Oslo
(2021)
|
Joshua Polanski
|
The intensely sickifying tint of Oslo... is a product of its Western production.
Posted Jul 19, 2024
|
|
|
The Ice Road
(2021)
|
Joshua Polanski
|
The action itself is, technically speaking, good. But the stakes of the action are contrived, with cartoonish insurance agency antagonists who may as well have stepped out of a children’s movie like Sonic the Hedgehog or Detective Pikachu.
Posted Jul 19, 2024
|
|
|
Gunpowder Milkshake
(2021)
|
Joshua Polanski
|
Gunpowder Milkshake is most entertaining when Laurent Demianoff’s fight choreography takes precedence over any dialogue.
Posted Jul 19, 2024
|
|
|
The Last Letter From Your Lover
(2021)
|
Joshua Polanski
|
[The performances of the two leads are good but] do too little to ameliorate The Last Letter From Your Lover from the wounds of tropes and conventions.
Posted Jul 19, 2024
|
|
|
The Suicide Squad
(2021)
|
Joshua Polanski
|
The Suicide Squad feels like the twilight of the age of superhero movies, making way for a new form of megablockbuster to exchange places.
Posted Jul 19, 2024
|
|
|
The Last Temptation of Christ
(1988)
|
Joshua Polanski
|
The Last Temptation of Christ ... is a movie that matters.
Posted Jul 19, 2024
|
|
|
The Last Duel
(2021)
|
Joshua Polanski
|
The tri-perspective story emphatically works. It also has the benefit of making room for three excellent performances from the leads.
Posted Jul 18, 2024
|
|
|
Passing
(2021)
|
Joshua Polanski
|
Its pure existence may be a sign of hope to cinephiles.
Posted Jul 18, 2024
|
|
|
King Richard
(2021)
|
Joshua Polanski
|
King Richard suffers from ... a conflict of interest.
Posted Jul 18, 2024
|
|
|
Near Dark
(1987)
|
Joshua Polanski
|
[Near Dark's] style so precisely matches the content that every directorial choice feels indelible.
Posted Jul 18, 2024
|
|
|
Chungking Express
(1994)
|
Joshua Polanski
|
Wong Kar-wai is one of the best filmmakers from one of the most significant film movements... And, in my opinion, Chungking Express is his best film. Supposing one plus one still equals two, that makes this one of the best films ever made
Posted Jul 18, 2024
|
|
|
Don't Look Up
(2021)
|
Joshua Polanski
|
The film suffers in that the human moments aren’t nearly human enough.
Posted Jul 18, 2024
|
|
|
Dog
(2022)
|
Joshua Polanski
|
Channing Tatum’s Dog is too mature—in comedic material if not always in theme—to completely fit into ... [the genre] expectations [and this] is probably the best thing that can be said about the defiantly mediocre film.
Posted Jul 18, 2024
|
|
|
The Sky is Everywhere
(2022)
|
Joshua Polanski
|
[Josephine Decker's] bold film grammar is innovative, in part, because Christian-Buddhism has never been taken seriously by a visual artist before.
Posted Jul 16, 2024
|
|
|
Yaksha: Ruthless Operations
(2022)
|
Joshua Polanski
|
By sidestepping [the] basic moral conflict, Yaksha is artistically hollow.
Posted Jul 16, 2024
|
|
|
Anatolian Leopard
(2022)
|
Joshua Polanski
|
The political metaphor mostly hits...as a pandemic-era film, such reflection on political incompetence isn’t that great of a reach for any audience, Turkish or American alike.
Posted Jul 16, 2024
|
|
|
Top Gun: Maverick
(2022)
|
Joshua Polanski
|
It’s a good thing it looks good ... because the plot is bare-thin.
Posted Jul 16, 2024
|
|
|
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
(1972)
|
Joshua Polanski
|
[Irm] Hermann gives the best performance of the film—and she does so without saying a single word. In my opinion, it’s one of the best performances in Fassbinder’s legendary run,
Posted Jul 16, 2024
|
|
|
Hustle
(2022)
|
Joshua Polanski
|
Built from the ground up on the back of cameos, the atmospheric creating factor of the guest appearances separates Hustle from the completely “just because” ones in superhero movies.
Posted Jul 16, 2024
|
|
|
Glasshouse
(2021)
|
Joshua Polanski
|
The sci-fi elements of The Shred just didn’t work with the period-piece aesthetics.
Posted Jul 16, 2024
|
|
|
The Sea Beast
(2022)
|
Joshua Polanski
|
Any movie with a giant purple crab can’t possibly be that bad.
Posted Jul 16, 2024
|
|
|
The Gray Man
(2022)
|
Joshua Polanski
|
For myself, star performances and expensive grand sets are two non-negotiable ingredients of a blockbuster. The Russo brothers’ newest film has both. (And maybe it’s just a two-ingredient genre film, but that’s perfectly fine with me).
Posted Jul 16, 2024
|
|
|
Bullet Train
(2022)
|
Joshua Polanski
|
There’s no reason the adaptation couldn’t have either cast Japanese actors or completely rid itself of the origin country by putting the train somewhere else entirely. Both options would have been better than what resulted.
Posted Jul 16, 2024
|
|
|
Luck
(2022)
|
Joshua Polanski
|
The super-polished [animation] style actually works for me…and possibly for the first time since Pixar’s early films. In a utopian world demarcated by luck, the polish sells the look. Luckiness should be slick and cool
Posted Jul 16, 2024
|
|
|
Carter
(2022)
|
Joshua Polanski
|
There are some regretfully great action pieces here—the spinning helicopter fight being the best among them—but the spectacle is calculatedly capricious beyond redemption.
Posted Jul 16, 2024
|
|
|
Beast
(2022)
|
Joshua Polanski
|
In light and dark, dry and wet, peaceful and pouncing, the critters— entirely CG from my understanding—might be the most realistically rendered animals since 2019’s Lion King.
Posted Jul 16, 2024
|
|
|
Seoul Vibe
(2022)
|
Joshua Polanski
|
[Seoul Vibe] falls short of the high bar it sets with its references to John Woo and Edgar Wright.
Posted Jul 16, 2024
|
|
|
Cobra
(2022)
|
Joshua Polanski
|
Once the globetrotting stops, so does the fun. Cobra becomes almost impossible to watch in all its carelessness.
Posted Jul 16, 2024
|
|
|
Drunken Master II
(1994)
|
Joshua Polanski
|
[Jackie] Chan is at his damn finest.
Posted Jul 16, 2024
|
|
|
The Greatest Beer Run Ever
(2022)
|
Joshua Polanski
|
In The Greatest Beer Run Ever, [war] sort of is made for television. The filmmakers try to have their PBR-flavored cake and eat it too—and that just doesn’t fly in a movie about the lies and deception of mass murder that was Vietnam.
Posted Jul 16, 2024
|
|
|
Amsterdam
(2022)
|
Joshua Polanski
|
A moralizing version of [a] great political thriller ... I suspect that sounds like an ill-advised way to spend an evening.
Posted Jul 16, 2024
|
|
|
Little Palestine: Diary of a Siege
(2021)
|
Joshua Polanski
|
Little Palestine is ... a testament to the power of digital cinema.
Posted Jul 16, 2024
|
|
|
Farha
(2021)
|
Joshua Polanski
|
[Darin J. Sallam] found one of the world’s future great talents. I can’t overstate this: what [Karam] Taher does with her Farha is nothing short of canonical.
Posted Jul 14, 2024
|
|
|
Huda's Salon
(2021)
|
Joshua Polanski
|
Huda’s Salon ... is an impatient film working in a genre where sometimes patience is the key.
Posted Jul 14, 2024
|
>