Yorgos Lanthimos returns to the Croisette after winning the Un Certain Regard prize for his bizarre feature Dogtooth back in 2009. This year the Greek director moves up in the ranks of the festival by competing for the Palme d’Or with his star-studded English-language dystopian love story The Lobster that can also ironically be described as a satire of our…
Let’s get the first question you are undoubtedly having out of the way. No, The Connection is not a French remake of The French Connection. In actuality, the title is a bit misleading. Outside of the time period and the titular heroine connection, these are two completely…
There was a time when the western genre was king. It created stars in John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, and then America just kind of got over it. Maybe it’s like Toy Story 2 asserts, that the emergence of space travel heralded the end of the cowboy. But this was a genre that made up so much of our cinematic history. Other genres have gone through similar ebbs and flows, perhaps the…
By any estimation, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s post-political career (e.g., The Last Stand, Escape Plan, Sabotage) hasn’t reached the commercial or critical heights of his pre-political career (he served as governor of California from 2003 through 2010). As with any actor or performer with an action-hero résumé, age has taken its toll, but changing tastes, shifting audiences (moviegoers age out too), and …
Mr. Kaplan, Uruguay’s 2015 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar submission from writer/director Álvaro Brechner, follows a 76-year old Jewish man’s existential struggles with old age. In late 1930s Poland, his family sent him alone to South America to avoid religious persecution. His family promised to meet him there, although perhaps they knew they never…
Director April Mullen’s 88 is a violent 88-minute blend of revenge, lost identity, bloodshed and both pure and twisted love. The film opens with Gwen (Katharine Isabelle) sitting alone in a diner, confused and disoriented and missing a finger, with no idea how she got there or what happened to her hand. After dropping the contents of her backpack and accidentally shooting a waitress with a gun she has no …
The key to any comic book movie’s success is its characters, and nobody seems to know this better than Joss Whedon. One of only three people to have a sole writing credit for an MCU film and the only one to do so for two films, Whedon has not only written a sequel that runs laps around the original in terms of action and scale, but it also raises the stakes in ways that very incredibly real and dramatic.
I used to be utterly terrified of Freddy Krueger. I had never seen Nightmare on Elm Street (and to this day, I still haven’t) but I vividly remember the poster that hung in my local video store; that clawed hand creeping over the head of teenager. I can…
Based on actual police reports surrounding the events of a series of murders in France in 1978, Next Time I’ll Aim for the Heart follows a duplicitous murderer through his dual life as a serial killer and policeman (technically a gendarme). The killer prepares to fulfill his dark fantasies as he travels through…
“It’s just like life: you get the funny with the tragic,” Noel Marshall says in one of the Roar’s dozens of unintentionally hilarious lines. One can’t help but wonder how aware of the irony of that statement he was. Roar is a movie whose very existence is predicated on a dark comedic tragedy, the zaniest Hollywood story that puts all other “making of” stories to shame. There aren’t enough words in the dictionary to describe just …