Annual screening never disappoints. 
Bill Butler’s wide lens-heavy cinematography (which looks particularly vivid on an LG OLED screen utilizing the “Filmmaker mode” to enhance the experience) leans into filling the frame with so much information in both the foreground (usually reserved for interesting faces) and background, allowing Young Steven to keep the camera evolving in the scene with less need for coverage (likely much to the producer’s ire). 
Every time I watch one of the best movies ever made I…

Really dug this animated anthology spanning centuries of PREDATOR encounters on earth. 
Lavish, lush SPIDER-VERSE-esque animaton with plenty of Cinematic scope and swagger that I almost wished this was live-action. 
All three mini-tales are satisfying but the mainly wordless 2nd installment, The Sword, had a compositional confidence and even playfulness in the storytelling that just plain rocked. 
Love Trachtenberg has become the PREDATOR franchise whisperer with lots of universe-building still up his sleeve to show this franchise has plenty of…

Andres Veiel’s documentary is hardly the first attempt to work through the paradoxical life of Leni Riefenstahl as all at once masterful filmmaker, close Hitler associate and endless self-apologist - indeed much of it comprises footage from several television interviews that she gave over the subsequent decades, and from Ray Müller’s earlier documentary The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (1993). Yet Veiel also has access to Riefenstahl's extensive archive, and so is able to present not only the life…

LG OLED's Perfect Black display strikes again, as Shutter looks like it were fresh out of the theater, with a home video presentation now clearer than ever and properly drenched in deep, dark hues. Despite its origins as a landmark Thai horror film, Masayuki Ochiai's 2008 remake is shot like a noir thriller. With an atmosphere of instability growing moodier by the minute, its PG-13 rating never actively disrupts the supernatural edge. Led by established primetime performers such as Joshua…

Whether you're seeing it as a first-time viewer or revisiting the series for the hundredth time, it's easy to agree that American Pie holds a pivotal space in the teen comedy circuit as a definitive cultural artifact of the turn of the millennium, and of the genre leaning towards raunch that was previously saved for slapstick stories. Modern high school students rushing to lose their virginity is almost an unspoken established rite of age, which is why Paul Weitz's film…

Metafictional horror-thrillers have been all the rage since the mid-90s, so it comes as no surprise that the following decade would see the trend in Italy. Do You Like Hitchcock? is a genuinely sleek, modern tribute to the foundational films of Alfred Hitchcock, courtesy of Dario Argento, which, in this case, means a made-for-TV murder mystery centered on a group of video rental patrons. Without the deconstruction of the media in front of you, nor the stylized gore that giallos…

I still maintain upon a rewatch that COMPANION is a blast from start to finish and that it's more successful as a Coen Brothers-esque "idiots in way over their heads" dark crime comedy than it is as a "big tech" satire. Perhaps heavily emphasizing in the marketing that this was "From the Producers of BARBARIAN" somewhat inflated expectations, for this doesn't have the big, gear-shift twists and sense of discovery that Zach Cregger's film had, but it is still effective…

Don't see it for the endless exposition, or for the tying of narrative threads from earlier franchise entries that never seemed loose in the first place. What matters here is the action set-pieces - one featuring Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) diving alone through an abandoned submarine full of nukes on the ocean floor, another showing him climbing around the outside of two airborne biplanes. The stuntwork - some done by Cruise himself - is incredible, but there is (again given…

Off the windswept coast of Fuerteventura, one of the Canary Islands, stands the American Star, a ship that became stranded decades ago and has stayed there ever since, abandoned and immobile, apart from the occasional dramatic shift in its position.

Not only does that vessel lend its name to Gonzalo López-Gallego’s moody noir, but it also serves as a metaphorical correlative for the protagonist Wilson (Ian McShane), a similar outsider similarly aged and imive, who has been sent to this…