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It's kind of hard to believe that  The Strangers came out almost ten years ago. I wasn't too thrilled about the film back then and it's slipped from my memory since. Still, it's hard to understand why it took so long for a sequel to get churned out, considering the first film was a surprise hit for a seemingly elementary premise: A couple ( Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman ) is terrorized inside their vacation home by three masked murderers. The money shot in The Strangers , as many moviegoers already know, is of Tyler's character standing next to her kitchen, completely unaware of the murderous intruder slowly appearing the dark background. The shot is unnerving for two reasons: 1.) The evil figure dons a homemade Halloween mask made out of a burlap sack and 2.) The scene takes its time to linger, allowing our eyes to make the horrifying discovery for ourselves. Too bad the rest of The Strangers isn't as clever. It devolves into a "shock horror" gimm...

Some people should never get married. Likewise, some people should never become parents. Crudely enough, the protagonists of  Andrey Zvyagintsev 's new film Loveless fit both of those descriptions. The Leviathan helmer returns with another bleak and unflinchingly honest portrayal of family dysfunction and social politics. Loveless is also a commentary on modern Moscow. Zvyagintsev uses the car radio as the film's cultural master of ceremonies, informing the audience of the state of Russia, the political climate and expected societal norms. In fact, the only other time the car radio isn't used for exposition, is when a character turns it into an aural weapon to antagonize another character, by blaring loud metal rock during an inappropriate time. The coal-hearted characters in Loveless listen to the radio, but hardly to each other. Early in the film we learn that Zhenya ( Maryana Spivak ) and Boris ( Aleksey Rozin ) are in the final steps of finalizing their divorc...

The protagonist of Estonian filmmaker Rainer Sarnet 's  Where Souls Go (from 2007), a fifteen-year-old girl named Ann, sets the plot in motion when she visits a satanist's website and says a prayer (in an effort to seek solutions) that inadvertently gives her newborn stepbrother a heart disease. Ann also has a poster for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King on her bedroom wall, prominent in many shots of the film. This image is a strong representation of Sarnet's interests: to acknowledge how fantasy (with its mythical creatures and wish-granting powers) shares an overlap with hell (and its evil incarnates). Considering this, it's no wonder that Sarnet chose to adapt Andrus Kivirähk 's novel " Rehepapp ," which focuses on 19th-century Estonian village peasants and the dead souls that lurk in the forest, for his latest film November . How can I best describe November ? Well, it's as if Michael Haneke 's The White Ribbon was re-constr...

Two words: Hype kills. Although Marvel's Black Panther is already estimated to pull in gargantuan numbers at the box office this opening weekend, I'm afraid the overblown hype surrounding the film will outshine any of the film's actual achievements. It's better than Marvel's last outing, Thor: Ragnarok -- but that's not really saying much. Still, Ryan Coogler 's ( Fruitvale Station )  Black Panther offers an agreeable serving of impressive special effects, beautiful art direction and most importantly, a sense of optimism. And these days, we need that more than ever. Chadwick Boseman  reprises his role as T'Challa (a.k.a. Black Panther ), Prince of Wakanda, a fictional country in Africa as envisioned by the Marvel Cinematic Universe. We first met Black Panther in 2016's Captain America: Civil War , where we also witnessed the death of his father King T'Chaka ( John Kani ) after a bombing of an international conference in Vienna. The openi...

The opening sections to Sebastián Lelio 's A Fantastic Woman provide the key to understanding its power and urgency. During the opening credits we see beautiful waterfalls later described by a character in the film as being one of the wonders of the world. Then we're introduced to Orlando ( Francisco Reyes ) a fifty-something divorcée and business owner. Orlando is treating himself to a morning at the spa. Next, we see him tend to some matters at his work desk. On the surface, it looks like another agreeable day in the life of an accomplished man living in modern Santiago, Chile. Then we see Orlando walk into a cocktail lounge with live musical accompaniment. The camera suddenly lingers on the musical band's singer. This is Marina ( Daniela Vega ), a trans woman -- and the film's real protagonist. The filmmaking strategy here is clear: Marina is not only forced to exist in the background of her society, but she's also nudged to back at the outset of her own movie....

The Japanese director  Kiyoshi Kurosawa has been directing films for both the big screen and television since the mid-1970s. Kurosawa is not exactly genre-specific but he's probably best known for his Japanese horror films, like The Cure and Pulse (which Wes Craven later wrote an English adaptation for in 2006). However, I find Kurosawa a more interesting filmmaker when he steps out of his popular horror genre, like he did with his 2008 masterpiece Tokyo Sonata . That film was a straightforward drama on the surface, observing a family in disarray after the patriarch loses his job but doesn't have the stomach to share that information with his wife; it curdled with an implosive sadness and palpable urgency beneath the surface. Kurosawa depicted the everyday struggle as a sort of a horror spectacle, but with dialed down theatrics in order to let us feel his characters angst and uncertainty. It's really a remarkable film. Now Kurosawa returns to a more visually spectacul...

The "found footage" genre has been around for some time, in both fictional form (1999's  The Blair Witch Project ) and nonfiction form (1927's  The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty ). If one considers the overwhelming amount of available found footage content online, namely through social media videos that people Snap or Tweet or Facebook Live every few seconds, it becomes clear that we need to gauge this appropriated art catalog through a new cultural viewfinder. It also prompts us to ask this important question: What public imagery is worthy of being curated for studied viewing? Russian filmmaker  Dmitrii Kalashnikov 's The Road Movie  (distributed by Oscilloscope Laboratories ) is a good example of social videos being culled together to give us a surprising and thoughtful insight into how we behave and feel -- today. The Road Movie is a moving image montage that is comprised of dashboard camera footage from dozens of Russian drivers, from all walks of life. As ...

If you follow the Oscars -- especially, if you've been following them for many years -- sometimes the stories behind who win and why they win can become more fascinating than the Oscar-winning films themselves. Take the case of Annette Bening , for example. After her Best Supporting Actress nomination for 1990's The Grifters , her first real shot at winning an Oscar came with her Best Actress nod for 1999's Best Picture-winner American Beauty . Bening lost to Hilary Swank for Boys Don't Cry that year. Flash forward a few years later to Bening's next Oscar nomination, 2004's Being Julia (for which the National Board of Review awarded her Best Actress): Bening lost the Oscar again. And to who? None other than Hilary Swank (again) who won for Million Dollar Baby . It was after this "Swanky-twofer" that Bening's hunt for the prestigious Oscar-worthy performance got kicked into high gear, for better and worse. Outside of her nod for 2010's Th...

There's a section in the opening act of Paul Thomas Anderson 's perplexing and often brilliant 2012 film The Master where its protagonist Freddie Quell ( Joaquin Phoenix ) is working as a portrait photographer in the main foyer of a Marshall Fields-esque mall. It's the 1950s and the wardrobe donned by all the background extras is meticulously true to the time and the whole scenario feels very lived in; you can almost smell the apparel, the perfumes coming from the cosmetics department and the hot light bulbs burning at Quell's photography stand. I mention this particular section from The Master because Anderson's new film Phantom Thread takes those tangible atmospheric qualities and creates an entire film built around the convincing sensory experience of living and breathing during a historical time and place. This time Anderson has chosen the couture world of 1950s London and he reunites with the great Daniel Day-Lewis (the two previously collaborated on ...

For most of his career Oscar nominee Liam Neeson did a remarkable job of shifting from prestige films like Schindler's List , The Mission and Gangs of New York to edgy genre pictures like Darkman , Gun Shy and Batman Begins . Neeson, a tall, intimidating Irishman with a looming presence, knew his real strength was in those piercing eyes of his. They could emote pain and despair just as easily as they could switch to steely grit. Looking back at his filmography now, it's surprising to see that it took until 2009's Taken for studios to cash in on his leading man specialness. Taken became an unexpected hit, grossing $226 million globally on a modest budget of $25 million. And the formula of Taken was simple: position Neeson as a trusting family man and father who is put to the test when his daughter is kidnapped. Oh, and it's also good to mention that Neeson's character is a retired CIA agent who knows how to kick the shit out of anybody. But what made the f...

When Sony Pictures  decided to abruptly pull their latest film All the Money in the World from AFI Fest in November, people were surprised. Then when director Ridley Scott announced he planned to  replace the film's star Kevin Spacey with Christopher Plummer a mere month before its scheduled Christmas release date, people were downright shocked. And now, in the most impressive of ways, Scott actually pulled this last minute reshoot off in only nine days! But what about the film itself? Outside of all this behind the scenes drama, is it any good? I’ll give you the short answer: Yes. All the Money in the World is based on the later years of real life American industrialist J. Paul Getty  (Plummer), who went a long way from his Minnesota roots to become—at the time—the richest private citizen who had ever lived (which with inflation today would be close $9 billion). The central plot focuses on an infamous and publicly-followed incident where one of Getty...

On one level, Craig Gillespie has grown into a director with an agreeable work ethic. Specifically, I mean that in how he adapts his sensibilities into whatever project he is working on, for better or worse. The first film I saw of his was Lars and the Real Girl during the 43rd Chicago International Film Festival . Gillespie was there for the post-screening Q&A where he mentioned his background in commercial work before transitioning to feature films. Lars was an assured piece of filmmaking; quiet, introspective and smartly laced with delicate humor. I looked forward to seeing how the Gillespie film canon would grow. Unexpectedly, the next film Gillespie made was the remake of the 1980s horror comedy  Fright Night , starring Colin Farrell . It in no way shared anything close to the special subtle drama of Lars (although I admit I enjoyed Fright Night on a superficial level, mainly because of my soft spot for vampire films). Since Fright Night , Gillespie switched gears ...

Earlier this week I was reading about how President Donald J. Trump shockingly removed climate change from the list of global threats in the latest rendering of his administration's national security strategy. "Fake News" has reached critical mass, it would seem. As 2017 comes to a close, and the axis of the Earth and human existence spins wildly closer to extinction, along comes this imperfect, well-meaning, occasionally hilarious, and ultimately touching motion picture from Oscar-winner Alexander Payne . The film is Downsizing and it stars the face of the American white male: Matt Damon . Whatever public relations shit storm  Damon may find himself in during the days leading up to the film's release shouldn't detract from what really is a golden and quietly surprising performance. This is good work by the former Will Hunting. Downsizing takes place in the near future where a group of Norwegian scientists have successfully created a procedure that shrinks ...

Luca Guadagnino has become the J.D. Salinger  of Italian cinema. I mean this in that he tells stories about affluent high society people, with lots of money and resources at their disposal, who still suffer from a failure to establish meaningful connections in their lives. Holden Caulfield felt such a void in Salinger's "The Catcher in The Rye." Similarly, Guadagnino's previous films I Am Love and A Bigger Splash followed protagonists (both played by Oscar winner Tilda Swinton ) who were in a purgatory of disenchantment, the former for physical affection and the latter for desired privacy. Guadagnino is not a novelist but fortunately as a filmmaker he knows how to fill the page of the screen, usually with drop dead gorgeous locations and an impeccable ear for using music (remember Ralph Fiennes dancing to "Emotional Rescue" by The Rolling Stones ?). In his latest feature Call Me By Your Name Guadagnino presents to us another illustrious group of h...

There was something electric in the air when that first teaser for Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens  premiered back in 2014. A sinister voice on the soundtrack asked, "There has been an awakening...have you felt it?" Then there was a barrage of clips teasing something familiar for Star Wars fans. That familiarity was the style and look of the original trilogy's western frontiers, with a kick of space cowboy bravado. It was void of the prequel trilogy's green screen approach and cutting edge technological risks (though I will defend those jubilant  George Lucas entries til the end of time). Unfortunately, J.J. Abrams '  The Force Awakens ended up being a pleasantly mild carbon copy of A New Hope , recycling tropes and story situations from that film as some gesture of assurance for a new generation of fans; if anything, it was setting up a dutiful cover song trilogy. So when it was revealed that writer/director  Rian Johnson was going to helm E...

Much of what you'll read in the coming days about Steven Spielberg 's supremely entertaining  The Post  will no doubt focus on how timely the film is in regards to the current administration in the White House, the freedom of the press (or lack thereof I should say), the ballooning of "fake news" and the dwindling presence of actual newspaper offices. All those parallelisms are valid, and were no doubt the primary themes screenwriters Liz Hannah and Josh Singer ( Spotlight ) set out to establish, but now that I've watched The Post twice I think there's something else being pulled into focus here. More on that later. The year is 1971 and The Washington Post publisher Kay Graham ( Meryl Streep ) is on the eve of taking her newspaper company public. The paper has been in her family since the dawn of time, and following the passing of her husband (the paper's previous publisher) Kay's been tasked with securing the future of the business against the ...

A big reason why Guillermo del Toro is so loved by cinephiles (myself included) is that his passion for cinema is evident in almost every frame of anything he makes. Whether it's the stunning cinematography that fills the screen canvas (usually in 1.85:1 aspect ratio, as opposed to 2.35:1) with a treasure trove of production design details and movie homages, the memorable music scores (e.g. you can literally hum the score for Pan's Labyrinth ) or the parable-like quality some of his stories have ( Crimson Peak , Cronos ), you know within the first five seconds that you are watching a Guillermo del Toro film. His signature screen voice is memorable. Other popular filmmakers with signature voices include Martin Scorsese , Spike Lee and Kathryn Bigelow . You know each of their cinematic screen voices because they are distinct -- and because those voices are real. They come from a place of deep affection, curiosity, pain, wonder, fear and conviction. It's why they endure ...

These days with almost hourly revelations of high-profile men -- albeit in the media industry or politics -- getting called out for sexual misconduct allegations, it's hard to ignore director Woody Allen 's own controversial past (he married his stepdaughter) when gauging his new film Wonder Wheel . Of course, the idea is that we critique the work and not the artist. That is fair. And yet, in a stroke of cosmic cynicism, it turns out that Allen doesn't need any shade from his personal past to hurt the intended success of Wonder Wheel because the film is just plain ol' bad. Wonder Wheel stars Academy Award winner Kate Winslet as Ginny, our disillusioned and itching-for-another-crisis heroine. Ginny, her husband Humpty ( Jim Belushi , bless him) and her son Richie ( Jack Gore ) live in an apartment looking over the boardwalk of Coney Island. It's the 1950s. Summer is winding down, resulting in less attendance and therefore less money for our boardwalk inhabita...

If you were to glance at the Instagram page for James Franco 's The Disaster Artist , you would think it's another polished Judd Apatow comedy (who also appears in the film, in addition to Apatow-regular Seth Rogen ). If you were to watch the trailer for The Disaster Artist , it looks like the latest art project in Franco's prolific filmography as a director. If you were to read media coverage of The Disaster Artist , some film writers and pundits would like you to believe that this is an actual  dark horse for the Oscars. Now that it's been some time since I've seen the film, and have mulled over what the hell it categorically is, I can tell you that none of the above descriptions accurately paints the picture. It's a strange film, with some seriously cynical and unnerving undercurrents, starring some of the most likable and good-looking movie stars currently working. I don't know if it's going to achieve the affectionate success that its source m...