There is no denying David O. Russell’s success in the 2010s. Throughout that decade, Russell made four films, The Fighter in 2010, Silver Linings Playbook in 2012, American Hustle in 2013, and Joy in 2015. Each of these films grossed over $100 million at the worldwide box office and garnered tons of awards attention. All four films combined earned 26 Oscar nominations, three of them for Best Picture, five of them for Russell’s directing…

  While watching Runner, I could not believe that this was the feature-length directorial debut of director Marian Mathias. There is such control and visual understanding in every aspect of Runner that you usually don’t see from someone with only one feature film under their belt. While the story didn’t fully work for me, I was in complete awe of everything I was seeing on screen. Runner followers Haas (Hannah Schiller), a soft-spoken 18-year-old living…

  Travis Stevens’ A Wounded Fawn would make a perfect double feature with another 2022 horror movie, Fresh, with the theme of the two films being “don’t go to a house in the woods with a man you just met”. While the two films have a similar creepy setup to them, they are both very different movies. Fresh was a straightforward gross-out cannibal story, A Wounded Fawn is a little more complicated than that. Stevens…

  Alex Heller writes, directs, and stars in The Year Between, a darkly funny comedy about mental illness and the importance of family. Heller plays Clemence, a college student who drops out of school and moves back in with her parents in an Illinois suburb following a newly diagnosed mental illness. While at home, Clemence is constantly clashing with her parents (Steve Buscemi, J. Smith-Cameron) and her two younger siblings (Emily Robinson, Wyatt Oleff), who…

  EO is a modern version of Robert Bresson’s 1966 Au hasard Balthazar, which finds us on a journey with a donkey, named EO, as it explores modern Europe and the people who live in it. It is a gorgeous and moving film that is almost a truly great film. We open the film finding EO at a circus, working in his act in front of a relatively big crowd. He is loved by the…

  If These Walls Could Sing, the new music documentary from Mary McCartney, daughter of Beatles’ legend Paul McCartney, looks at the legendary Abbey Road recording studio in London and the history behind it. With artists like The Beatles, Pink Floyd, and many others have recorded in this studio over the years, the documentary only scratches the surface of the studio’s history and acts as something just above a Wikipedia entry. A large chunk of…

  Following in the footsteps of recent documentaries Collective and Navalny, The Killing of a Journalist is another startling and powerful documentary about the death of a journalist and the government conspiracy behind it. The Killing of a Journalist looks at the story of investigative journalist Jan Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kusnirova, who were brutally murdered in Slovakia in 2018. Using evidence uncovered by Kuciak’s colleagues, the film looks at the mob-style hit on…

  Vicenta B is the reason why I love film festivals. The film isn’t a modern masterpiece or anything, but it is a film that I am glad I was able to see. It took me to a world I knew nothing about, embedding itself in the culture and giving us interesting characters that are well-written. It also comes from a filmmaker who is on the rise with a bright future. This is why film festivals…

  John Hyams’s Sick is interesting because it uses the COVID-19 pandemic as a major part of the plot. There have been movies that have mentioned COVID or have featured scenes where characters are wearing masks, but Sick makes COVID a key element of the plot. Not only is it the framing device of the film, but it plays a key part in the events that take place throughout the movie and it does so…