While Mexican director Guillermo del Toro has become a vastly recognizable artist across several mediums (with his name gracing novels, films, FX’s The Strain, and even aborted video games), there is certainly one particular piece of his that has gained him respect and favor throughout the industry: Pan’s Labyrinth. The 2006 dark fantasy film was…
What is it that makes for a great crime film? Is a movie a crime film simply because it deals with illicit characters? In that case, couldn’t a lot of political films be classified as such? Or what about corporate life? Aren’t these people infinitely worse than the robbers, thugs, and gangsters that continually saturate…
Making a crime thriller set in contemporary New York is tricky these days for one principal reason: there isn’t that much crime there anymore. In the 44 years since Martin Scorsese released Mean Streets, the Concrete Jungle has cleaned up its act by pushing out the pimps, pushers, and pornographers and replacing them with overpriced…
For a movie that has accumulated such a high volume of accolades since its premiere, it’s a bit perplexing to find that Baby Driver is actually a bit of a difficult movie to review. Perhaps it’s because so much has been said about the film already, but the more likely reason is that the movie…
For a number of reasons, it’s logical for people to perceive that the quality of indie cinema has diminished since the dawn of the new millennium. After the auteur slump in the early 1980s, filmmakers like David Lynch and the Coen Brothers brought indie prominence back to the forefront of American cinema, ushering in the…
If you just caught the 1st season of FX’s latest original series Legion (although given the less-than-stellar ratings I’m thinking you haven’t), then you probably have a rush of feelings towards it. Over the season’s eight episodes, viewers were given a relentlessly strange narrative that was ostensibly trying to do something transgressive with the superhero…
It’s rational to think that one hasn’t fully matured as a human until they’ve come to understand death. No matter how much one has been told about the taxing toll of losing a loved one throughout their life, it’s really impossible to know what grief feels like until you’ve actually experienced it. The turmoil and…
When your debut feature film receives attention for containing materials that causes audience members to faint, one must wonder what that says about your capabilities as an artist/provocateur. This did indeed happen when French director Julia Ducournau screened her film Raw at The Toronto Film Festival last fall, and it’s an ugly fact that’s been latched onto the film…
Social thrillers are hard to pull off. While, sure, there have been numerous genre films that have managed to satisfy as entertainment while still being potent allegory, there are exceedingly more instances where filmmakers get bogged down with their ideas, resulting in a half-baked execution (The Purge franchise, anyone?). For Jordan Peele’s directorial debut, however,…
Screenplay writers hate Hollywood! It really is as simple as that. There's a good chance you would too if you had to go through all the studio bullshit (i.e., studio rewrites, budget cuts, lame-brain producers) just to see a version of your project reach theaters that barely resembles what you had in mind. Just ask…
