Movie Reviews

The Story: Two actresses find their friendship torn apart by interpersonal rivalries and society's expectations of women when their vacation takes an unexpectedly surreal turn with fatal consequences. The Lowdown: Director Sophia Takal's lofty ambitions are undermined by an ideologically conflicted script, but exceptional performances save the production from outright failure.

The Story: Sole tenant of a Brazilian apartment complex defies offers from construction company to relocate after living there for decades. The Lowdown: An introspective on aging and modern Brazil, this film seriously takes a long time to deliver its very serious commentary.

The Story: An unorthodox exorcist (or evictor) who enters the minds of the afflicted is called in to remove a demon from the body of a child. The Lowdown: A curious concept isn't enough to make up for the general goofiness and low budget horrors on display.

In Brief: 'Tis the season for holiday horrors with the THPS, so for the next three Thursdays we'll be showing a selection of seasonal slashers sure to sate the sadists. We're kicking things off with the film that started this surprisingly replete subgenre, 1972's Silent Night, Bloody Night. This may well be one of the earliest examples…

In Brief: Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World (1991) is both like a Wenders film (check out the soundtrack) and not. The film — at least till it hits the final stretch — is as quirky as anything the filmmaker ever did, but it’s a bit more playful. It’s certainly one of the more…

In Brief: As far as two-tissue tearjerkers go, they don't get much weepier than George Stevens' 1941 Cary Grant, Irene Dunne dram-com, Penny Serenade. Grant and Dunne play a couple whose marriage deteriorates following the loss of a child, and the melodrama doesn't come anywhere close to ending there. For all its emotionally exploitative holiday-set heartstring tugging the…

The Story: Timothy Leary and Ram Dass reconcile their fractured friendship and recall their long, strange trip in the months leading up to Leary's death in 1997. The Lowdown: Documentarian Gay Dillingham finds an affective new angle on an extensively covered chapter of counterculture history by using the two men's mythology to address weighty existential dilemmas surrounding mortality.

The Story: In order to save her island community from ecological collapse, a young girl must reconnect with her culture's seafaring past and enlist the help of a trickster demigod to right an ancient wrong. The Lowdown: A slightly more considerate and ethnically inclusive variation on the virtually unassailable Disney model of family-friendly story telling, Moana hits all…

The Story: An ambitious young driver and a naive starlet, both under the employ of Howard Hughes, fall in love while struggling with their employer's eccentricities. The Lowdown: A passion project long in the making for director-writer-producer-actor Warren Beatty, Rules Don't Apply is very clearly the singular vision of its creator — with all of the contingent benefits and pitfalls…

The Story: A Canadian intelligence officer and a French resistance fighter try to start a family under the shadow of suspicion during WWII. The Lowdown: A better concept than the film that resulted, Allied wears its influences on its sleeve but fails to live up to its Classical Hollywood antecedents.

The Story: Original "Bad Santa" Willie Soke returns for more misanthropic holiday high jinks, this time with his malicious mother in tow. The Lowdown: An unnecessary sequel to a film that should've been allowed to stand on its own, Bad Santa 2 falls short of its potential — if not of reasonable expectations.

In Brief: When the AFS showed the original Godzilla last year, I brought a date who called it the worst movie she had ever seen. We are no longer on the best of terms, and needless to say, she will not be invited to our screening of Gamera. While it's not a great film in the classical sense of…

In Brief: François Truffaut’s Day for Night (1973) is not only a great movie about movies, but it’s fascinating as an example of how international cinema truly is. By this I mean that while we think of foreign film as a separate world, Day for Night is clearly the kind of movie that could only have…

In Brief: It wasn't that long ago that Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin — then known mostly as Potemkin — was in the top five of nearly all lists of the greatest films ever made. While the 1925 Soviet film seems to have been downgraded in recent years, it remains an essential of cinematic literacy, one…

The Story: A white man and a black woman in the Jim Crow South fight to preserve their family in the face of overwhelming odds, eventually taking their case to the Supreme Court and changing the course of civil rights history. The Lowdown: Deeply affective and masterfully expressed, Loving is an expertly crafted recounting of a crucial, if somewhat under-examined,…

The Story: A young Iraq War soldier reflects on his heroism and that of his comrades when their story is turned into a patriotic stage spectacle by groups wanting to both celebrate and exploit their service. The Lowdown: More than just a story about war, and the terrific ensemble cast forces audiences to grapple with difficult answers…

The Story: An introverted teen girl struggles to cope with her older brother's romantic interest in her best friend while her life seemingly crumbles around her. The Lowdown: Writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig crafts a funny and affective portrayal of the pitfalls of female adolescence that transcends its genre trappings.

The Story: Magizoologist Newt Scamander must fight against opposition both ambiguous and overt in his quest to recover lost specimens from his mystical menagerie. The Lowdown: This Harry Potter-adjacent franchise-builder falls far short of being a Magical Mystery tour-de-force.

The Story: A cocky boxer ends up paralyzed in a car crash and is determined to enter the ring once more. The Lowdown: A generic, based-on-a-true-story tale of overcoming odds (and such) that works reasonably well but is nothing to get excited about.

In Brief: By the time Charles Chaplin wrote, directed, produced and starred in the first feature-length production entirely under his own control, he was already the most famous movie star on Earth. Chaplin, being Chaplin, stuck with the formula that made his earlier short films so successful, but turned the heartstring tugging up to 11. Semi-autobiographically…