Last September, Daniel Craig’s swan song as James Bond was finally released after being held back nearly two years due to the global pandemic, making its title, No Time to Die, more than a little ironic. Directed and co-written by former UCSC slug Cary Fukunaga, No Time to Die is now available on home […]

  Wrapping oneself up in the warm blanket of nostalgia has always been an alluring proposition. Cult filmmaker Edgar Wright provides a corrective to those rose-colored cravings with Last Night in Soho, a creepy ghost story with a twist. Thomasin McKenzie stars as Eloise, a small-town U.K. girl with a supernatural gift for seeing things […]

  Paul Thomas Anderson is one of our great contemporary auteurs. Case in point, his 2007 film, There Will Be Blood, is frequently cited as a masterpiece of 21st century filmmaking. His latest movie, Licorice Pizza, is a sweet, funny, occasionally poignant, and completely original coming-of-age story that follows the lives of two young people […]

  Another remake of a classic film has come to town, pitching its tent like a carnival of the grotesque. Fans of film noir will immediately recognize the title of the movie it’s based on: Nightmare Alley. The original was a black & white release that hit screens in 1947 just days before Halloween. Now […]

  A single man gets a taste of parenthood in C’mon C’mon, the new indie drama written and directed by Mike Mills. Joaquin Phoenix stars as Johnny, a radio journalist working in Detroit on a project involving children responding to big questions about life. When his sister, Viv, played by Gaby Hoffmann, has to leave […]

  It’s Belfast, 1969, and rioting Protestants are invading a peaceful Catholic neighborhood. A Molotov cocktail explodes in front of an eight-year-old boy while he’s standing in the middle of the street, paralyzed with fear. His name is Buddy, and ironically he’s the youngest son of a Protestant family that lives peacefully alongside those now […]

  It doesn’t take very long to recognize a Wes Anderson film. His tenth feature, The French Dispatch, takes his go-to formula – wide-angle lenses, symmetrical compositions, deadpan humor, and whimsy that occasionally oversteps into the land of twee – and spikes it with steroids. Brimming with new and returning talent, including Adrien Brody, Benicio […]

  Christopher Nolan is one of those rare filmmakers who routinely make high concept genre films with massive budgets, usually in the service of exploring two of his pet obsessions – the amorphous nature of identity and the subjectivity of time. Because his box office success allows him to realize his unique visions unencumbered by […]

  On a remote farm in Iceland, a middle-aged couple works a sheep farm. Their marriage appears to be solid, even though the woman, María, seems a tad discontent compared to her husband, Ingvar. They both work long hard days made even longer by the midnight sun. Neither need to talk – each knows their […]

  Hearing the title of the 2017 film, I Am Not a Witch, might conjure up pop culture memories of a woman accused of witchcraft in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The Python’s absurdist test to determine if the accused is a witch was to see if she weighed the same as a duck. […]