Director Josh Greenbaum and writer Dan Perrault team up for neither of their best work with Strays, a lackluster crude dog comedy whose blessedly short run time is its most redeeming feature.
Category: Film
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Review: Passages
Passages, New York-based filmmaker Ira Sachs’s tempestuous love-triangle drama, feels like a precious anomaly within the landscape of contemporary American cinema.
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Review: Blue Beetle
There is a recent idiosyncratic, smart superhero movie about family and togetherness. It’s called Encanto. I’d suggest watching it and skipping Blue Beetle entirely.
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Review: The Unknown Country
A solitary figure in a car traversing the American West in a movie can be as iconic as it is innocuous: a placeholder for every kind of journey, be it spiritual or material; a seeking of or a fleeing from.
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Review: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem
These turtles are animated in an electric style that resembles clay splashed with vibrant colors and rough sketch lines. It’s enough to power this loving, if somewhat tame, reboot.
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Review: Meg 2: The Trench
It’s a clumsy action movie with the occasional spurt of fun monster conflict amidst a sea of flat characters and a tiresome plot of corporate espionage.
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Review: The Last Voyage of the Demeter
Norwegian filmmaker André Øvredal directed this predictable, gruesome, but unscary horror tale, which is inspired by chapter seven of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, known as “The Captain’s Log.”
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Review: Amanda
For her debut feature, Cavalli’s character study of a sardonic protagonist offers a unique voice to coming-of-age anxiety.
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An artist in exile
Fazel Ahad Ahadi expected to spend his whole life in Afghanistan with his extended family. But in summer 2021, Ahadi found himself hastily dismissing class and speeding home to raise a bonfire of books in his backyard. The Taliban had reclaimed Afghanistan’s capital city, and a 20-year artistic renaissance had come to an abrupt and violent end.
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Review: H.I.M.
Anthony Bawn’s H.I.M. follows Damien (Brandon Karson), a heartbroken college student, and his cousin, Kendall (Rahim Brazil), who finds a romance with a church boy, rocking his relationship with his mother. The film opens with a harsh conversation between Kendall and his friend—two Black gay men in the closet—where Kendall challenges his sexuality and experience […]
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Review: Wolfkin
A note from the author: This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movie being covered here wouldn’t exist. Most monstrous puberty and coming-of-age movies, like Ginger Snaps and The Lost Boys, center on the experiences of the tween or […]
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Review: Zoey 102
Nostalgia is a powerful thing. From Gossip Girl to Raven’s Home, from iCarly to Girl Meets World, the last decade, for better or worse, has so far proven to be the era of the revival. It can sometimes feel a little unoriginal, as studio after studio looks back into the vault to see what hasn’t […]
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Review: A Compassionate Spy
The latest from renowned documentarian Steve James provides an intriguing historical counterpart to this summer’s Oppenheimer yet suffers from some indulgences and limited perspective.
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Review: Kokomo City
A triumphant and impactful directorial debut for D. Smith with the staying power of Paris Is Burning, Kokomo City asks us what it means to be at peace with ourselves and what we’re willing to sacrifice to get there.
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Review: Theater Camp
The film deftly captures the high emotional stakes of being a theater kid, whether you’re still a child or a full-grown adult.