I have found a love for the modern Western in the past few years. From direct reimaginings of classics like True Grit to genre blends like Bone Tomahawk, modern cowboy stories are making a grand return. The latest entry into the chronicles of the 21st century rancher is Concrete Cowboy, the feature debut of Ricky…
It’s tough to make a truly standout courtroom drama. Most of the celebrated ones are from the 1950s and 1960s, like 12 Angry Men, To Kill a Mockingbird, Witness for the Prosecution, and Anatomy of a Murder (okay, that last one might not be as well known, but it absolutely should be!), and the surge…
With each new film, Terrence Malick burrows even deeper into his niche. He’s an artist in the truest sense of the word, with his recent body of work consisting of uncompromising and challenging films that serve as sublime visual poetry for some and patience-burning wastes of time for others. A Hidden Life is his most…
Anthony McCarten, screenwriter of The Theory of Everything, Darkest Hour, and Bohemian Rhapsody, has returned this year to pen the Netflix biographical drama, The Two Popes, and reteams with his most faithful collaborator, the first paragraph of the Wikipedia page about his subject. Like McCarten’s other films, The Two Popes is generally entertaining even if…
Rian Johnson’s work is typically layered and complex, weaving various plot threads and character arcs into films that can barely contain their own dense narrative. His addition to the massively homogenized Star Wars franchise is the boldest, densest entry since The Empire Strikes Back, even accounting for the disastrous idiosyncrasies of The Phantom Menace. Knives…
When a film makes me cry (and by cry, I mean tears well up in my eyes and my throat gets tight, full on weeping has only happened once) it is rarely because the film is sad. It hardly ever happens during those emotionally manipulative films that just want to show the hardships of life…
Investigative journalism films directly appeal to me, mostly because I love movies about everyday people being good at what they do for a living – the first horse training sequence in The Rider brought me to tears, for instance. I was excited for The Report, because it bears most of the genre’s conventions, but also…
Sometimes the stories that don’t get made into films can be even more revealing of the dynamics within Hollywood than the ones that do. Though one of the most important American historical figures, until now, Harriet Tubman never received the biopic treatment given to so many other less significant individuals. Born into slavery and later…
Bong Joon-ho has one of the most interesting and varied careers of this century so far. Aside from a couple of relatively straightforward crime-dramas (Memories of Murder, Mother), his work often balances an ambitious concept with humor, social commentary, and thrilling set pieces, to varying results. His latest, Parasite, takes a brilliantly conceived story about…
In 1965, Orson Welles wrote, directed, and starred in Chimes at Midnight, an adaptation of a variety of William Shakespeare’s plays, primarily those included in the Henriad. Welles had long held an interest in Shakespeare and adapted many of his plays to both stage and screen. Initially produced for live performance, Chimes at Midnight closed…
Cinema Etc. 