Features
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Tuesday, Nov. 14, 2023
Review: Writer-Director Kristoffer Borgli's "Dream Scenario"
Quick: What's a good adjective for Nicolas Cage's screen presence? Mercurial, perhaps? Volcanic? Volatile? How about mundane, schlubby, average? Not the page we'd think to turn to in our Roget's Thesaurus. Yet here Cage is, channeling his inner drabness to chillingly comic effect in Kristoffer...
Monday, Nov. 13, 2023
Review: Director Francis Lawrence's "The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes"
Two hours and 37 minutes is pretty long for a "ballad," but you can't call it "The Hunger Games: The Three-Cycle Opera of Songbirds and Snakes" now, can you? Concision was never much in favor in the four "Hunger Games" films, which reached a seeming finale with 2015's "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay...
Wednesday, Nov. 8, 2023
Review: Director Nia DaCosta's "The Marvels"
The stakes feel immensely low in "The Marvels," and it's not because this is a movie that spends a fair amount of time following cats or has an out-of-nowhere musical number. It's possibly that somewhere along way, Marvel movies just stopped feeling like events. And this galactic trifle from...
Tuesday, Nov. 7, 2023
Review: Director David Fincher's "The Killer"
It's a noir staple to open with a bit of narration, but once the nameless hit-man protagonist of David Fincher's "The Killer" starts gabbing, he doesn't stop. As Fincher's assassin (Michael Fassbender) awaits his target from a high, unfinished floor in a Paris building that looks out on the home of...
Thursday, Nov. 2, 2023
Review: Director Christopher Zalla's "Radical"
On their first day sixth grade, the students of Jose Urbina Lopez Elementary School in the Mexican border city of Matamoros find their new teacher rolling on the floor surrounded by overturned desks. They're not desks, he exclaims. They're lifeboats. So begins Christopher Zalla's "Radical," an...
Wednesday, Nov. 1, 2023
Review: Director Raven Jackson Debuts With "All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt"
Nature provides much of the soundtrack to " All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt," a poised and occasionally transcendent debut from writer-director Raven Jackson. The sounds of crickets and birds, flowing water and the wind in the long summer grass are only sporadically punctured by a song at a party, or...
Wednesday, Oct. 25, 2023
Review: Sofia Coppola's "Priscilla"
Dreamily gazing at the album covers of Elvis Presley was not, statistically speaking, a rare habit among American teen girls in the late 1950s and early '60s. But for Priscilla Beaulieu, teenage fantasy became a strange and surreal reality. Sofia Coppola's "Priscilla," starring Cailee Spaeny,...
Friday, Oct. 27, 2023
Road To Oscar Preview: Directorial and Writer POVs
On The Holdovers (Focus Features), director Alexander Payne fell in love with making period films. From the experience, Payne--an avid history reader who majored in the subject in college--said he realized that a period movie is “the next best thing to time travel.” At the same time, though, Payne...
Thursday, Oct. 26, 2023
Lensing "The Holdovers," "She Came to Me" and "Our Flag Means Death"
One Emmy-winning cinematographer collaborated for the first time with Alexander Payne, taking on a feature film which reunited the director with actor Paul Giamatti. Another DP sought and got a return engagement with writer-director Rebecca Miller--this time on an emotionally relevant romantic...
Monday, Oct. 23, 2023
Review: Director Alexander Payne's "The Holdovers"
Alexander Payne brings audiences to a New England boarding school in 1970 in " The Holdovers," a textured, nostalgic and often funny piece about three lonely and mismatched souls stuck together over Christmas break. It's a keeper and possibly even destined to become a classic. The holiday movie...