Festivals News

Telluride kicks off 50th SHOW with lineup drop, tribute announcements

The most mysterious of the big fall film festivals, Telluride keeps its lineup a secret until festivalgoers are ​already en route to the high-altitude of the San Juan mountain town. Sure enough, just as I was boarding my flight for Colorado they provided me ample reading material to prep for the extended Labor Day weekend of moviegoing.

Reviews

The Moon is Korea’s answer to Apollo 11 on steroids

As two seasoned space men are out fixing the damage on their lunar-bound rocket, a catastrophic explosion sends one out into oblivion and punctures the others’ suit leaving the rookie Hwang Seon-woo (Kyung-soo Do) to fend for himself in an increasingly dangerous thrill-ride of a mission.

Reviews

Landscape with Invisible Hand creates a weird, yet apt look at inequity but falls a bit flat

Aliens have made contact. They aren’t the grey, lanky kind so often portrayed, but a flat, squishy rectangle… think pink, fleshy end table with eyestalks. The Vuvv communicate through scratches and scrapes via pads at the end of their front appendages. Neither have they “come in peace” or aggression, they’re here to get access to humanity and our resources using commerce as the common language.

Reviews

Seong-hun Kim’s Ransomed isn’t your typical political thriller

Based on the true story of an eager South Korean diplomat, Min-joon (Ha Jung-woo) who risks his life to save a colleague. Set in the 1980’s at the height of Lebonese warring factions, Min-joon is leaving the Korean Diplomatic office in Seoul for the night and happens to pick up a call containing a coded message. A colleague who’d been given up for dead after being kidnapped in Beirut long ago managed to make contact in hopes of finally being rescued.

Reviews

Cowabunga dudes! TMNT: Mutant Mayhem sparks a second-wave of Turtle Mania.

What a time for Nineties Kids to be alive with access to massive studio filmmaking budgets! In what’s been a pretty great summer of adult filmmakers playing with (and recontextualizing) their childhood toys on the big screen, comes another strong nostalgia play in the form of TMNT: Mutant Mayhem. Spearheaded by “permanent teenager” Seth Rogen, we get a satisfying reboot of the teen turtles who cowabunga’ed their way into pop culture ubiquity when they made the jump from comics into morning cartoons, film, video games, and action figure adaptations in the late 1980s. 

Reviews

Afire is a slow-burning seaside chamber piece until it isn’t

We meet twentysomething friends Leon and Felix, just as their working holiday home gets off to a rough start. Getting away from city life to focus on creative pursuits, their Benz stops firing correctly, breaking down a rustic lane, out of cell service, in the middle of a forest. Felix optimistically runs ahead to find a path, leaving Leon alone in the woods to stew over this inconvenience. It’s a portentous beginning, and a pattern that will repeat itself often in their time by the coast in German director Christian Petzold’s take at a “summer film”.

Reviews

Oppenheimer is a masterclass in filmmaking

As long as I’ve been writing about the arts (somewhere near twenty years now), I’ve tried to keep any effusiveness in check, lest I feel like one of those critics whose names appear on movie posters declaring some Hollywood dreck like a Transformers movie life-changing. So when I left the theater after watching Oppenheimer, my emotions were almost foreign. I felt wonder and astonishment and like I had seen one of the best films I’ve seen in my life.