7 years ago
Featured (10 posts found)
Spotlight on Fandor: “Mikey and Nicky”
Mikey and Nicky certainly resembles a New Hollywood-era feature, with its time-worn earthen colors, drab lighting, and fidgety cameras. But as with the rest of Elaine May’s criminally small filmography, the film’s sense of humor is shockingly modern. Indeed, t...
Read more →
The Value of Being “Lynchian” Instead of Being Unique
Recently, someone asked me to describe It Follows, David Robert Mitchell’s horror film currently in theaters. Having just seen it and unable to come up with the right words, I immediately settled on “Lynchian” without really knowing why. Afterward, I stitched ...
Read more →
Now Playing: Movie Mezzanine + To Be Cont’d
Since the inception of Movie Mezzanine in the winter of 2013, it’s been a series of trials and errors. We’ve undergone myriad redesigns, editorial changes, hirings and firings, grand openings and grand closings of new subsections. Throughout this time, I have ...
Read more →
“Lost River”
Some movies arrive in body bags, crushed under the weight of toxic advance word to which too many critics, eager to join the consensus pile-on, gleefully align themselves. Since its catastrophic reception at Cannes nearly a year ago, Ryan Gosling’s directorial...
Read more →
“Clouds of Sils Maria”
“Thinking about a text is different than living it.” Internationally renowned European movie star Maria Enders, portrayed by internationally renowned European movie star Juliette Binoche, speaks these words to her personal assistant Valentine (Kristen Stewart,...
Read more →
Hollywood’s Old Honchos: Burt Reynolds and Clint Eastwood
In a very special episode of the animated television series Archer, Burt Reynolds makes a guest appearance as himself playing the love interest of Malory Archer. Idolized by her son, the superagent Sterling Archer, Reynolds is portrayed affectionately as the e...
Read more →
Going Glib: On Alex Gibney’s Fleet, Tactless Scientology Exposé
The Church of Scientology is famously thin-skinned as institutions go, but you can’t really fault them for wanting to take a collective hit out on Alex Gibney’s Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief. If the film isn’t quite the polemic its title su...
Read more →
Such a Beautiful Day: On The Works of Don Hertzfeldt
Don Hertzfeldt is, in my not-so-humble opinion, one of the most talented filmmakers working today. That statement may sound hyperbolic, but only until you consider that all of his movies are about stick figures, and that their combined lengths barely adds up t...
Read more →
Spotlight on Fandor: “Meek’s Cutoff”
Westerns as diverse as High Plains Drifter and Johnny Guitar have portrayed the Old West as a great conflagration—a hell of scorched land and inhospitable, forgotten souls. Meek’s Cutoff, on the other hand, presents the West as purgatory—a bleached-out void wh...
Read more →
Kornél Mundruczó and Teresa Miller on “White God”
When Hungarian writer/director Kornél Mundruczó wanted to make a cinematic parable in which stray dogs stand in for humanity’s social undesirables, he knew he’d need a skilled animal coordinator/trainer to pull it off. The story of White God involves hundreds ...
Read more →