Woody Allen’s Clumsy But Passable Dramedy Is More Mediocrity From His Waning Late-Stage Period [Venice]

Category: Reviews

Woody Allen’s Clumsy But Passable Dramedy Is More Mediocrity From His Waning Late-Stage Period [Venice]

I remember reading years ago that whenever the time comes for Woody Allen to make a new film, he opens a drawer in his desk and picks at random from the piles of scripts he has written over the years.…

An Egypt Affair Featured, Reviews Film Threat

Marlin Darrah’s An Egypt Affair has all the sense and aesthetic of a bygone adventure novel. And despite an expected overindulgence in melodrama and contrived plotting, the film is still quite amusing. However, what tilts the story from so-bad-it’s-good to…

Tülin Özen‘s Striking Performance Drives Selman Nacar’s Gripping 24-Hour Moral/Legal Drama [Venice]

You don’t need to know much about the criminal justice system to understand its broken, biased, and grim nightmare— unfair, unjust, unforgiving, a bureaucratic Kafka-esque hellscape you never want to be trapped within. Turkish filmmaker Selman Nacar (“Between Two Dawns”)…

Ghost Town Featured, Reviews Film Threat

The Western film has long been a Hollywood staple genre since the days when real cowboys would congregate at the corner of Sunset and Gower (Known as Gower Gulch) in Los Angeles to get a day’s work as an extra.…

Riz Ahmed & Jessie Buckley Test Their Love Connection [Telluride]

TELLURIDE – We’re just gonna get the bad news out of the way first. There is perhaps no movie more personally – and emphasis on “personally” – disappointing at the 2023 Telluride Film Festival for this critic than Christos Nikou’s…

A Boat for My Brother Featured, Reviews Film Threat

A Boat for My Brother carries a lot of emotional weight. I mean this in both the sense of poignancy as well as baggage. One would not be surprised by the film’s poignancy. After all, it is a documentary about…

William Friedkin’s Deceptively Simple Swansong Is Another Morbid Excavation Of Human Weakness & Cruelty [Venice]

A quote by William Friedkin himself opens “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial,” describing the film, as well as all the filmmaker’s other works, as being about “the thin line between good and evil.” This line is all the thinner here, in…

The Teen Comedy Genre Gets A Much-Needed Kick In The Ass

Summary Bottoms is a violent and riotous teen comedy that brings back the anything goes feeling missing from high school comedies and movies as a whole. The film features Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri as PJ and Josie, two Rockbridge…

Perpetrator Review: A Promising Premise That Falls Short

Perpetrator, directed by Jennifer Reeder, is a film that attempts to blend elements of supernatural transformation with a mystery surrounding a series of teen girls’ disappearances. While it offers an intriguing premise and a few commendable performances, it ultimately falls…

‘The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon’ Review

This review was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the series being covered here wouldn't exist.You know what would make a good zombie story? One where a…

Julia Louis-Dreyfus Takes On A Celestial Embodiment Of Death

TELLURIDE – At a festival full of gutsy films Daina O. Pusić’s directorial feature debut, “Tuesday,” may be the most visionary of them all. No small feat when you’re premiering opposite works from Yorgos Lanthimos, Pablo Larrain, Jonathan Glazer and…

Founders Day Featured, Reviews Film Threat

The screenplay for Founders Day, by director Erik Bloomquist and his brother Carson Bloomquist, feels like a reaction to the ever-growing political divisiveness in the United States. In the town of Fairwood, the mayoral election is heating up. Incumbent Blair…

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