In the cinematic tradition of Goodfellas and Boogie Nights, Damien Chazelle’s Babylon charts the rise and fall of a glorified yet ignominious subculture with visual aplomb and raucous depravity. But Babylon may be the last of its kind. The era it memorializes is in many ways its own. The film…

Martin McDonagh, a playwright and the filmmaker behind such place-based dramedies as In Bruges (2008) and Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri (2017), is at home in the omnidirectional grievances of small communities and limited locations. The site of his new existential buddy-comedy-gone-sour, The Banshees of Inisherin, is no different…

When Zendaya won the Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series in 2020, she was already an international superstar. But Euphoria had not yet become the phenomenon it soon would be. Over the intervening months of pandemic lockdown, audiences caught up with the first season of creator Sam…

From box office failures to festival darlings — DAYS (dir. Tsai Ming-Liang; dist. Grasshopper Film)

A Preview — SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME

Wilder loved his sleazeballs. The trick was getting audiences to love them too. — A couple of lowlifes make their bed with a get-rich homicide scheme; a never-been writer drinks away the words and his self-respect; an indigent screenwriter degrades himself as the boy toy of an over-the-hill movie actress; a deceitful newspaper man is willing to kill for his next big break. This…

A study of space and story. — I first encountered Steve McQueen’s work at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2008. The piece on exhibition was a video installation from 2001, “Girls, Tricky.” Cloistered in a soundproof room, bass booming, on a 14-minute loop, a suffocating camera pushes over the trip-hop musician Tricky’s shoulder as he growls…

2020 has been the year of the female filmmaker. Of course, there is something bittersweet to that statement. While the asterisk that will haunt film revenue tabulations will never be the most significant data point of the year, there is a troubling and familiar story embedded in this year’s downsized…

I have been teaching film studies courses at a private high school for five years now, and I have never, not once, screened Citizen Kane for my students. I have shown Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil before, but my students’ interest began to wane in the back half, once the…