DeMonaco: The Purge: Election Year (2016)
The third and final film in The Purge trilogy, Election Year makes a significant jump into the future, opening with a brief prologue set in 2022 – the backdrop to the [...]
January 2017
Shyamalan: Split (2017)
Released barely a year after The Visit, M. Night Shyamalan’s Split has all the same crazy, tipsy, balls-to-the wall inanity that made his return to psychological thrillers [...]
Affleck: Live By Night (2017)
It’s a peculiarly sinking feeling when a film is not merely as bad as reviews would suggest, but even worse. So it is with Ben Affleck’s Live by Night, his follow-up to [...]
Jenkins: Moonlight (2016)
One of the most elusive and ethereal films about queerness that I have seen in some time, Moonlight is based upon Tarell Alvin McCraney’s In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, [...]
The Crown: Season 1 (2016)
In his collections of writing on the early days of television, the great film critic Andre Bazin kept coming back to the same event over and over again – the coronation of [...]
Burr: Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (1990)
Two key images, or textures, dominate the opening of Leatherface, the third film in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise, and a reboot of sorts. As the opening credits roll, [...]
DeMonaco: The Purge: Anarchy (2014)
As befits a high concept franchise like The Purge, the three films in the trilogy are fairly schematic. Where the first offers a top-down approach, examining the purge from [...]
DeMonaco: The Purge (2013)
Although high concept films are often associated with lavish blockbuster spectacles, there’s something to be said for the way in which a B-movie franchise can take a [...]
Larrain: Jackie (2016)
Pablo Larrain’s second film – and biopic – released in 2016 is a study of Jacqueline Kennedy in the short period of time between the assassination of John F. Kennedy [...]
Tyldum: Passengers (2016)
I almost didn’t see Passengers, thanks to a series of excoriating reviews that seemed to suggest that there was absolutely nothing redeeming about Morten Tyldum’s second [...]