What, in this era of declining faith in our national institutions, a world in which a 2018 Gallup poll reported that only 5% of the country reported that they had a “great deal” of confidence…

Anyone could be forgiven for eyeing the 2 hour and 21 minute running time of “Bad Times at the El Royale” and being concerned that the film, a noir set almost entirely in a kitschy…

Who, watching the climactic maimings of 2005’s torture-porn classic “Hostel” or the cannibal exploitation of the truly repugnant “The Green Inferno”, indeed, who could possibly have foreseen that the director of those paragons of good…

Before I ever saw “Sorry to Bother You”, hip-hop artist-cum-filmmaker Boots Riley’s hilarious, transgressive satire, I had heard it compared to Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil”, which sounded great — “Brazil” is probably my favorite movie of…

“Christopher Robin” Urges You to Just Chill Out and Love the Pooh Somewhere on the other side of the Disney universe from Thanos and his galactic genocide, far from the patricide and limb removal of…

By Joe Shelton Sicario” (2015) was something very like a masterpiece, an ambitious tale of crime on the borderlands that sometimes felt like the progeny of a bloody-minded Western and an ethical inquiry disguised as…

by Joseph Shelton In these fraught times of fake news and other humbug, in which the truth seems to be losing its currency verisimilitude no longer equates verity, there are certain things that must be…

By Joe Shelton “Damsel”, the new Western oddity from writer/director team the Zellner brothers, is a love it or hate it proposition.  You’ll love it if you appreciate its unorthodox take on the American western…