April 4th, 2018
Wes Anderson returns to animation with “Isle of Dogs,” a showcase of expectedly eye-popping production design and art direction that partially obscures a pricklier, flintier corner of the world than the one adapted from Roald Dahl’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox” in 2009. Writing the screenplay from a story credited to himself, Roman Coppola, Jason Schwartzman, and Konichi Nomura (who also performs in the film as Mayor Kobayashi), the particular auteur embarks on an often melancholy…
March 28th, 2018
Only Lynne Ramsay knows the details behind her departures on a couple of movies, but we have been fully rewarded by her picky, methodical project choices. With just a trio of previous features, all undeniably brilliant, the Scottish filmmaker delivers an instant cult classic with her fourth, the visceral “You Were Never Really Here.”
Once upon a time, Ramsay circled “The Lovely Bones,” “Jane Got a Gun,” and a long-rumored sci-fi “Moby-Dick” without completing any of them.…
March 14th, 2018
A captivating lead performance by Lene Cecilia Sparrok anchors the stout and handsome “Sami Blood,” winner of the award for Best Narrative Feature at the 2018 Fargo Film Festival.
Set principally in the 1930s, director Amanda Kernell’s inaugural feature film identifies fiercely and intimately with Sparrok’s teenage Elle-Marja, who plots to leave her family and way of life for a different future in the city.
A member of the indigenous Scandinavian people known as the Sami,…
March 7th, 2018
Iconic feminist and women’s rights attorney Gloria Allred is the subject of Sophie Sartain and Roberta Grossman’s “Seeing Allred,” now on Netflix Instant Watch following its debut at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival in the U.S. documentary competition.
The veteran filmmakers craft an unapologetically worshipful highlight reel of Allred’s life and career, successfully recontextualizing the widespread public and media perception of the lawyer as a publicity-seeking celebrity…
February 28th, 2018
Considerably less accessible than his directorial debut “Ex Machina,” veteran writer Alex Garland’s “Annihilation” very loosely adapts Jeff VanderMeer’s novel into a demanding thought experiment bound to frustrate viewers counting on some of the trailer’s promise and premise.
As multiple critics have pointed out, the new film owes a thematic debt to Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Stalker,” a movie that Alissa Wilkinson suggests is, like “Annihilation,” about the…
February 21st, 2018
Hungarian filmmaker Ildiko Enyedi, whose 1989 debut "My Twentieth Century" won the Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, achieved another career highlight recently with an Oscar nomination for her most recent feature. "On Body and Soul"has been selected to compete for Best Foreign Language Film at the 90th Academy Awards. The movie is currently available to view on Netflix.
Despite the bloody immediacy of the film’s slaughterhouse setting, "On Body and Soul" is an often ethereal…
February 14th, 2018
Given the film’s somewhat odd marriage of style -- the personality-driven presence of chatty neophyte documentarian Bryan Fogel -- and substance -- the ugly realities of the longtime Russian doping program for Olympic competitors -- the inclusion of “Icarus” as one of the five Oscar-nominated nonfiction features came as something of a surprise.
But as the winter games get underway in Pyeongchang, South Korea on February 9, coverage of the Russians continues to dominate headlines in…
February 7th, 2018
Of the great designs in the history of movie monsters, there are few as satisfying as Universal’s stunning Gill-man. First envisioned by William Alland by way of Gabriel Figueroa’s Amazonian campfire story, the look of the Creature from the Black Lagoon belongs principally to Milicent Patrick. Christened “The Beauty Who Created the Beast” for a promotional tour, Patrick’s contributions to cinema iconography were unfairly squashed by jealous makeup artist Bud Westmore, who…
January 31st, 2018
A delectable and devilish exercise in exquisite restraint, “Phantom Thread” offers compelling evidence that Paul Thomas Anderson and Daniel Day-Lewis can do quiet and still as effectively as the thunder and lightning they made together in “There Will Be Blood.”
A supremely funny homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rebecca,” the new movie Day-Lewis claims will be his last sets the table for yet another master class in screen performance. The leading man’s perfectly monikered…
January 26th, 2018
Making its way to Netflix a year after debuting at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, "The Polka King" is the fictionalized version of Ponzi schemer Jan Lewan’s jaw-dropping journey from bandstand to prison cell. Played with his usual antic panache by Jack Black as an optimistic entrepreneur with mostly benevolent intentions, Lewan is an American dreamer by way of Poland, in way over his head.
Filmmaker Maya Forbes, whose semi-autobiographical first feature Infinitely Polar Bear earned…
By Josette Ciceronunapologeticallyanxiousme@gmail.com What does it mean to truly live in a community —or should I say, among community? It’s a question I have been wrestling with since I moved to Fargo-Moorhead in February 2022.…