When looking at the filmography of Alan Parker, the celebrated British director who passed away today at 76, the word “eclectic” seems inadequate. Films as different as “Bugsy Malone” (1976), “Midnight...
On November 8, 2018, the town of Paradise, California, was destroyed by the deadliest fire in the state's history, razing countless homes and businesses and displacing 50,000 citizens. Rebuilding the place was an agonizing feat of vision,...
“I hate exposition,” writer/director/actress Amy Seimetz said in a 2013 interview with Filmmaker Magazine. This hatred is on display in her first full feature, "Sun Don't Shine," where a nightmarish scenario is presented with an almost...
The great film analyst Tony Zhou named his famous series of video essays “Every Frame a Painting.” This movie could be titled “Every Frame a Ravishingly Pretty Painting.” Each shot in this mostly-World-War-II-set memory play,...
I returned to Mary Mazzio’s “A Most Beautiful Thing” with serious trepidation. After all, March 2020, the month in which this film was scheduled to premiere at the South by Southwest Film Festival before a nationwide rollout, feels...
Funny how a few years can feel like a millennium. It was in May of 2016 that I attended a sold-out screening of Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg’s scathingly hilarious documentary, “Weiner,” and joined the audience in guffawing at...
If you were a girl growing up in the early ‘80s in Los Angeles—and probably lots of other parts of the country—there was no band cooler than The Go-Go’s. From “We Got the Beat” and “Our Lips Are...
Sergio Navarretta’s “The Cuban” pulls together music, romance, loss, and memory into an emotional tale that spans cultures and generations. One thing connects them all: Cuban music. In the movie, a poster of legendary Cuban...
The celebrated Dom Toretto cross-stitch aphorism goes: “I don’t have friends. I got family.” Nick Rowland's “The Shadow of Violence,” which concerns an Irish Toretto-type afraid of his own muscles, expands the ideology:...
Howl, little wolves, howl, for your hearts are filled with love that still runs wild. As if it were a fable whispered in your ear by a soothing voice, “Los Lobos” ("The Wolves") radiates melancholic warmth with its story of a mother and...