A year ago, I was studying abroad in London and taking a theater review writing class with critic Jane Edwards. For our first assignment, I reviewed “Small Island,” giving it a perfect score. I tried to sing its praises as artfully and thoroughly as I could — only to receive…
In Joseph Haj’s “Hamlet,” a production put on to celebrate the Guthrie’s 60th anniversary, Claudius calls for “Lights! Lights!” during the fictional Murder of Gonzago play, as he has thousands of times in “Hamlets” past. In lieu of Claudius stopping human actors putting on the play, we have projections in…
What’s most appealing about Ang Lee’s “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” is that the story’s stakes are, for the most part, interpersonal. The film never forgets that inside of each of its incredibly strong, skilled, and lethal martial artists is a real, beating human heart. For them, it’s just as much…
Part of what makes a Studio Ghibli film so magical is Hayao Miyazaki’s love of flight, using his fluid animation to render beautiful scenes of his characters taking to the air. How these characters fly, however, is never the same from movie to movie: the way Porco elegantly carves the…
Field’s “TÁR” begins with a ten-minute interview with our titular character in which almost every other line of her dialogue is an obscure classical music reference. Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) is the worst kind of pretentious, because she has the résumé and acumen to warrant it. She’s an influential conductor,…
Optimism is underrated. Movies with cynical worldviews give a lot of food for writing, but it’s easy to get trapped in their dour mindset. You do need to remember that there is good in the world occasionally, and it certainly doesn’t hurt to document that goodness when you find it.…
Patton Oswalt not only catfishes his son over the course of“I Love My Dad” but also flat-out catfished me. I entered expecting a quirky Patton Oswalt comedy, but I left having inhaled sharply and butt-clenched the most out of any movie I can remember in a while. The poster, our…
The saxophone of Rashaan Roland Kirk’s “The Inflated Tear” wails in warning, distress and desperation as we follow a Black man in a trench coat in Chicago at night. He bursts into a club, shows off an FBI badge and shakes down the members of The Crowns shooting pool there.…
I have come to the conclusion that animated body horror is infinitely better than live-action body horror. This not only arises from how much of an aversion I have to live-action body horror, but because the animated medium provides enough distance between me and the gore for me to actually…
The quest to find oneself is a common one explored in a media of all stripes, but director Dee Rees applies a patient and heartbreakingly specific touch in crafting her 2011 film, “Pariah.” The film was screened this weekend by GMICC, the Gender Minorities in Cinema and Media Studies Collective,…