It’s not really a surprise to see Alfonso Cuaron join James Cameron, Martin Scorsese and Ridley Scott in that small group of film artists who have made 3D part of the essential toolbox of their imagery (no, Baz Luhrmann and Guillermo del Toro don’t make the list, although Michael Bay might).  Cuaron is a […]

  The writer-director Mike Cahill has staked out a unique piece of narrative territory for himself.  In both Another Earth and his new I ORIGINS, which debuted at Sundance last week (and won the festival prize for best science-based work), he explores the point where factual science meets not just science fiction, but something more metaphysical, an area […]

  The allegory is piled on so thickly in Yorgos Lanthimos’ THE LOBSTER that after a while, it’s not clear just what the underlying subject is supposed to be.  Lanthimos is a cult-favorite filmmaker (the cult mostly consists of critics and film festival selection committee members) whose arresting Dogtooth was an unlikely Best Foreign Film […]

  THE CHILDREN ACT (no distrib):  It’s not intended as disparagement to Ian McEwan’s novel and screenplay adaptation, or to Richard Eyre’s film, that THE CHILDREN ACT feels much of the time like it could be the pilot for a high-toned television series featuring Emma Thompson as a compassionate jurist specializing in family law who […]

  BOY ERASED (Focus/Universal – November 2):  Joel Edgerton’s film is the second of the year concerning gay conversion therapy, and its tone is far more conventional than The Miseducation of Cameron Post.  Lucas Hedges plays Jared Eamons (this is a fictionalized version of a true story), son of southern pastor Marshall (Russell Crowe) and […]

  SAVE YOURSELVES! (no distrib):  A moderately amusing sketch that doesn’t quite have the heft for feature length.  Writer/directors Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson satirize Brooklyn hipsters and sci-fi in their story of a couple, Jack (John Reynolds) and Su (Sunita Mani), who’ve decided to ditch their devices and spend a week in a […]

  MY OLD SCHOOL (no distrib):  Although the story is apparently well-known in the UK, here the twisty tale that Jono McLeod unfurls in his documentary would constitute a spoiler, so we’ll leave things vague here.  This much is fair:  in the early 1990s, a 16-year old student named Brandon Lee arrived at a Glasgow […]

  THE ZONE OF INTEREST (A24 – TBD):  Jonathan Glazer has only directed 4 feature films in his 23-year career (the most recent was Under the Skin a decade ago).  His latest, The Zone of Interest, is a work of formal brilliance, although unlikely to be to the taste of mainstream audiences.  So rigorous and painstaking in its […]