Quentin Tarantino’s skill is too pruned and too precise to not make an interesting picture, a compulsively entertaining one and the freedom to make an eccentric one. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a supremely textured throwback […]

Sergio Leone often goes for pure visual storytelling without dialogue, but everything indeed is a sophisticated puzzle piece. At the time in 1969, Once Upon a Time in the West was thought of as an overblown western […]

In which Terrence Malick opens up the aperture of his camera to capture exquisite rays of natural light on Jamestown circa 1607, only to give us a limited geographical sight of it all. That flustered me about The New World when I first saw it in 2005 […]

The luscious French erotic drama/reverie The Perfume of Yvonne is a neglected piece by director Patrice Leconte who had revered international success in the 1990’s […]

It’s like having your head washed in a toilet for a little more than two hours. Christiane F., from Germany, is one of the heralded foreign films of the early 1980’s, aggrandized by the shock value […]

Blowhard, preachy and a relentless gentrification screed. I feel sorry for the Jimmie Fails types that The Last Black Man in San Francisco is about, to be dislocated from the neighborhood […]

The fast cutting is everywhere in Danny Boyle’s musical comedy Yesterday. But instead of being frenzied or disorienting, it is quite exemplary for […]

The first image looks for a moment like a mood-setter throwaway, but director Ari Aster holds his camera on it. You look closer to see how peculiar it is, then realize, if the director is letting us gaze on this […]

The 1941 Dumbo was the fourth Walt Disney film and a rush job for the studio, it is lean in the storytelling department running at a nimble 64-minutes […]

Toy Story 4 opens in a rainstorm where one of the toys is in danger of getting swept down the drainpipe, and what the message is imparting to its little ones […]

Sleepy and mentally squishing to the point you walk out dumb and dumber after it’s over. If there’s one thing I learned in the course of two hours it’s that I cannot trust […]

“Interstellar” in 2014 was a momentous occasion before walking into the theater based on anticipation alone. You’d have to be blind not to see that while it was happening (in the second half in particular) it had spectacle and a vision […]