From the Collection: The Underground Railroad

From the Collection: The Underground Railroad

Barry Jenkins’ epic mini-series The Underground Railroad has been added to the Criterion Collection. A monumental reimagining of American history, Barry Jenkins’s adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2016 novel is a harrowing and rhapsodic journey through a still-echoing past. Weaving together historical fiction with moments of magical realism, The Underground Railroad is a full sensory immersion into the world of Cora (Thuso Mbedu), who, fleeing slavery, embarks on a treacherous quest for freedom—and is menaced…

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Movie Review: Tuesday

Movie Review: Tuesday

  Tuesday is a strange bird of a movie, literally and figuratively. I’ve seen several movies in my years about death and people learning to cope with it, but never one quite like this. Though it takes a bit to get going, Tuesday is a unique and emotionally harrowing film about a mother coming to terms with her daughter’s death. Julia Louis-Dreyfus stars as Zora, whose daughter Tuesday (Lola Petticrew) is terminally ill. Zora can’t…

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Movie Review: The Dead Don’t Hurt

Movie Review: The Dead Don’t Hurt

  The Dead Don’t Hurt is Oscar-nominated actor Viggo Mortensen’s second directorial effort following 2020’s Falling and while it is an improvement from Falling, I still find myself struggling with Mortensen as a director. Though shot well with some good performances, The Dead Don’t Hurt never fully clicked for me and ended up being a film I found mostly boring despite some moments of greatness. The Dead Don’t Hurt is a western and love story…

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Movie Review: What You Wish For

Movie Review: What You Wish For

  I saw What You Wish For at the Chicago Critics and to be honest, it was not one of my most anticipated movies of the festival. The film was barely on my radar as a movie coming out this year. The only reason I went to see it was because following the film was a screening of Martin Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead on 35 mm (which was amazing) so I thought I’d give…

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Movie Review: Last Stop in Yuma County

Movie Review: Last Stop in Yuma County

  Last Stop in Yuma County finds several strangers stranded at a diner in the middle of Arizona waiting for a gas truck to come to the neighboring gas station. The strangers include a knife salesman (Jim Cummings), a pair of thieves who just robbed a bank (Richard Brake and Nicholas Logan), the diner’s lone waitress (Jocelin Donahue), a couple looking for trouble (Ryan Masson and Sierra McCormick), and an older couple (Gene Jones and…

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Movie Review: The Watchers

Movie Review: The Watchers

  The Watchers marks the directorial debut of Ishana Night Shyamalan, the daughter of director M. Night Shyamalan. Since breaking out in 1999 with The Sixth Sense, M. Night Shyamalan has been one of the most polarizing directors over the last almost thirty years, so following in his footsteps is quite a task. But Ishana shows that she is a real-deal filmmaker with this well-made, eerie, flawed folk horror movie. The Watchers finds Mina (Dakota…

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