Screen
Keep the lights on
It always begins with light. Be it an ancient myth or a modern movie, light carves away the darkness and gives form and shape...
No country for poor men
Like a slow, rumbling thrum, the inevitability of Hell or High Water’s final act patiently chugs at you. One of those rare, gritty, morally...
Hard not to Laika
"Show your work.”
That statement is both an admonition given by rigid mathematics instructors and part of the reason why stop-motion animation continues to captivate....
Lady liberty triumphant
If a revolution could ever be distilled into a single image, then let it be Delacroix’s commemoration of the French Revolution’s July 1830 victory,...
Illuminating content
Dear incoming film students, take a moment to learn from those who came before you, and please heed Derek Cianfrance’s advice: “Be where you...
Dr. John Brinkley is just ‘Nuts!’
Dr. John Romulus Brinkley Jr. had trouble with the truth. But then again, Dr. Brinkley was an American, and Americans have a particular allergy...
‘Sausage Party’ goes further than you think
The first 70-or-so minutes of Sausage Party is obscenely insightful, a hilariously raunchy contemplation of how spiritual beliefs can be ignorance-inducing and socially blinding....
‘Suicide Squad’ is messy… but fun
Raise a glass: The magic of movie making is dead.
We don’t just know, “how the sausage is made.” No, no, no. Now we press...
The past and present collide in ‘Hell or High Water’
W
hen it comes to movie genres, none are as distinctly American as the Western and Film Noir. The Western, populated by cowboys, Native Americans...
The power of a magic feather
In Life, Animated — the new documentary from Academy Award-winning director Roger Ross Williams — one image in particular stands out: a toddler standing...
Stilled action
Like passionless martial coitus or a zombie doing Zumba, Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass simply go through the motions with Jason Bourne, a...
‘Daughter of Dawn,’ lost and found
French critic cum filmmaker Jacques Rivette asserted that, “Every film is a documentary of its own making.” While this is true of all movies,...
