The inciting incident of Alex Scharfman’s Death of a Unicorn is just that, the apparent death of a unicorn. En route to a weekend retreat at his boss’s cabin in the deepest part of the wilderness, Elliot (Paul Rudd) and his daughter Ridley (Jenna Ortego) accidentally hit a unicorn with their car and seemingly put it out of its misery. Instead of leaving it on the road where they hit it, they pack the…
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Arthur Penn’s 1975 neonoir Night Moves was recently added to the Criterion Collection. Arthur Penn’s haunting neonoir reimagines the hard-boiled detective film for the disillusioned, paranoid 1970s. In one of his greatest performances, Gene Hackman oozes world-weary cynicism as a private investigator whose search for an actress’s missing daughter (Melanie Griffith) leads him from the Hollywood Hills to the Florida Keys, where he is pulled into a sordid family drama and a sinister conspiracy he…
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Joan Micklin Silver’s 1988 romantic comedy Crossing Delancey starring Amy Irving was recently added to the Criterion Collection. Joan Micklin Silver’s wonderfully affectionate spin on the romantic comedy infuses the genre with a fresh, personal perspective, following an unmarried Jewish woman’s search for fulfillment in New York City. Happily independent bookstore manager Izzy (a luminous Amy Irving) isn’t looking for love, but she’s forced to reevaluate her desires when she catches the eye of two…
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Director Bong Joon Ho follows up his 2019 Oscar-winning sensation Parasite with Mickey 17, an entertaining and layered sci-fi epic that finds the director at his lightest and most optimistic. Mickey 17 follows Mickey (Robert Pattinson), a meek man who got into some financial trouble on Earth when his “friend” Timo (Steven Yeun) convinced him to open a macaroon shop. Turns out Timo is a bad person and got him and Mickey mixed up…
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It feels like every year at Sundance I see a movie that would have been better off being a short film rather than a feature. A film that has an interesting concept and a great beginning only for it to run out of steam rather quickly, leaving us with what feels like an unfinished film. At the 2025 Sundance Film Festival that film was Sophie Brooks’s Oh, Hi, a romantic comedy that has a…
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Amir ‘Questlove’ Thompson is quickly cementing himself as one of the best music documentarians we have working today. Following his Oscar-winning Summer of Soul, Thompson brings us another energetic and insightful music-focused documentary with SLY LIVES! (aka the Burden of Black Genius) which looks at the life and music of Sly Stone. Unlike another Sundance musical biopic, It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley, where I went in basically blind to knowing any music about the…
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André Is an Idiot opens with our subject André telling a story about how he once had an incident in which he was masturbating and he ended up with splinters in his privates. I’m not going to get into detail about the story, but he closes it by saying that this would have been the stupidest moment in his life but then he skipped getting a colonoscopy and was then diagnosed with stage four…
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