Within the first ten minutes or so of Brawl in Cell Block 99, Bradley Thomas (Vince Vaughn) angrily dismantles his wife’s car after learning of her infidelity. Nearly two hours later, the guy drags a baddie […]
Tag: 2010s
Lucky (Lynch, 2017)
Lucky is one big, warm farewell to Harry Dean Stanton, a man who didn’t hug the spotlight or seek out starring roles, but who made even the smallest parts count. What looks to be his penultimate […]
Staying Vertical (Guiraudie, 2016)
The largely aimless countryside jaunt that is Staying Vertical is saved from the scrapheap purely because of its intoxicating absurdism. It takes itself seriously and no one in the film laughs, but I would classify it as […]
The Work (McLeary & Aldous, 2017)
Therapy can be intense. Intensive group therapy? Man. I don’t know how else to compare such extreme cathartic intervention other than as a form of non-supernatural exorcism. It must take mountains of courage for grown […]
Phantom Thread (Anderson, 2017)
Many things can be said about Paul Thomas Anderson’s ravishing masterpiece Phantom Thread. That it’s a sterling period piece that evokes both the opulence of Ophüls and the twisted sensibility of Hitchcock is a given. That […]
Graduation (Mungiu, 2016)
It’s nice to see Cristian Mungiu channeling his inner Asghar Farhadi, spinning some of the Iranian’s moral fibers into the Romanian New Wave. It’s always been a fruitful method of critiquing one’s society, and Mungiu […]
Madeline’s Madeline (Decker, 2018)
There is a lot one can say about Madeline’s Madeline, and I feel like one’s interpretation of its contents will shift and evolve with time. It is such an immediate sensory experience that you aren’t really able to […]
Thunder Road (Cummings, 2018)
Jim Cummings is a star. Writing, directing, and starring in what can only be called cringe porn at its finest, Cummings gives us one of the year’s best independent achievements in Thunder Road, a full-length expansion […]
The Miseducation of Cameron Post (Akhavan, 2018)
Having already seen Joel Edgerton’s Boy Erased, I’m relieved to say that Desiree Akhavan’s The Miseducation of Cameron Post fares a lot better when it comes to depicting the abuses of gay conversion therapy. Fictional though it may […]
BlacKkKlansman (Lee, 2018)
Spike Lee’s passion is unmistakable. He knows just how to get at the heart of the issues and blaze them to the masses with ferocity, his films acting as missals for his faithful to fight […]
They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead (Neville, 2018)
I watched this before the 38-minute featurette A Final Cut for Orson, which is where all the details about The Other Side of the Wind’s restoration work are included. I wouldn’t have minded one long and comprehensive […]
The Other Side of the Wind (Welles, 2018)
The myth of The Other Side of the Wind has outgrown the film itself, to the point where you have to keep reminding yourself that it now exists for our consumption. Welles scholars have pored over this […]
The Old Man & the Gun (Lowery, 2018)
By now, I think we can say David Lowery’s ideal vision of cinema is one that takes its time to form in the viewer’s imagination. With a little patience, and with a little luck, people […]
November (Sarnet, 2017)
Lithuanian though I am, Estonian folklore is still quite a ways away from what I used to hear as a child. For instance, the concept of a kratt—a sentient creature made from household implements and […]
Rat Film (Anthony, 2016)
Anyone who goes into this thinking they’re going to learn about the physiology of rats and their historical notoriety as carriers of infection will be disappointed. This isn’t your standard nature documentary. It’s actually an […]
The Lonely Film Critic 