Gus Van Sant is as diverse a director as you can get because he has shown himself to be capable of making astonishing films and films so bad, they transcend the concept of mediocrity and become something unbearable. His most recent film, Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot is somewhere in between, and…
Category: comedy
Slice (2018)
Kingfisher is an ordinary town in the suburban Midwest. It is filled with hard-working folks who toil day in and day out to provide for their families in their working-class American lives. Kingfisher also just happens to be the most haunted town in America, and in an effort to allow the living and dead to…
Chimes at Midnight (1965)
You have to admire the sheer gall of Orson Welles – who else would dare become so dissatisfied with the limits of William Shakespeare’s work to go ahead and write their own versions of Shakespeare’s stories, using the Bard’s historically-resonant plays as a framework for their own vain lamentations of the reign of brutes and…
Eighth Grade (2018)
Kayla Day (Elsie Fisher) is near the end of eighth grade, on her way to high school. She is charming, funny and intelligent, but also deeply insecure and crushed by inextricable loneliness. She has very few friends, if any, and the only other person who seems to notice her existence is her father, Mark (Josh…
The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
I have a very difficult relationship with Wes Anderson. There are times when I wake up and consider him one of the most audacious voices in modern filmmaking, an essential visual artist who doesn’t make films – he composes them. There are other times when I think he is nothing more than a filmmaker who…
Destination Wedding (2018)
Perhaps the most succinct way to describe Destination Wedding is if Richard Linklater’s iconic Before…Trilogy featured two despicable curmudgeons who, instead of waxing poetic about life’s great philosophical quandaries, spew vitriolic misanthropy towards each other and society as a whole, while slowly falling in love. Anyone who knows me will understand how this is most definitely…
Hearts Beat Loud (2018)
Audacity doesn’t need a big budget to be fully-realized, and no one knows this better than Brett Haley, the director of some illuminating independent comedies, such I’ll See You in My Dreams and The Hero, as well as the subject of this review, Hearts Beat Loud. A gentle, unassuming and heartwarming project, this film is the representative of everything…
Damsel (2018)
There’s nothing better than a good genre film, especially a genre that has somewhat fallen out of favour. Except for a film that subverts the genre and re-imagines it as something entirely different, unique and wonderful. Nathan and David Zellner made Damsel, which could quite possibly be the most outrageously hilarious Western since Blazing Saddles…
BlacKkKlansman (2018)
When someone asks me why I admire Spike Lee, I normally point to any of his tremendous films such as Jungle Fever, 25th Hour, She’s Gotta Have It or Do the Right Thing, a film I consider to be the greatest film ever made by an American director. This year, he may have just proven…
Female Trouble (1974)
I’ve expressed my utter adoration and admiration for John Waters on so many occasions. I find his work so engaging and unconventionally charming, not to mention one is not likely to find someone so suave and endearing as him. Yet, every time I watch one of his films, I find myself wondering exactly why it…
The Postmodern Pelican 