The Key Once you get past the vanilla set up, Gedeon Burkhard’s The Key evolves into such preposterous camp that it’s impossible not to be entertained. The writer/director also stars as Tim, a failing business owner who signs a million dollar deal in …Read more

Languorous warm bodies, sweat dripping down necks, the glistening cold water of pools…the elements that make the summer sensuous and appealing, can easily flip and turn into something horrifying, and they do in Leslie Stevens’ Private Property. The …Read more

Jim Jarmusch’s documentary on Iggy Pop and the Stooges plays on the title of the 1970 Maysles brothers’ documentary, Gimme Shelter. That movie was about the tragic free concert put on by The Rolling Stones and Jefferson Airplane, among others, at Alt …Read more

We’re all familiar with the narrative elements of Moonlight —absent fathers, drug-users, the escalating path to incarceration, a life cut down and curbed before its potential reached, and desires discovered or relieved. Such is definitely the case fo …Read more

John McNaughton’s Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer reemerges as an important turning point in the world of horror cinema. Many The  Walking Dead fans may flock to this movie in the all-too-fitting precursory role for Michael Rooker as Henry, the qu …Read more

James Sadwith’s smart and touching Coming Through the Rye arrives with a simultaneously promising and dubious premise: a misunderstood teenager in 1960s America goes searching for JD Salinger to get his permission to play Holden Caulfield in a stage …Read more

Flor (Adriana Barraza) spends her days considering, and often declining, welfare applications in a bland government office, and her nights watching TV with her cat. She seems to both take great pride in her job, and some pleasure in finding arbitrary …Read more

Proudly, gloriously out of step with mainstream film culture, Paterson is like an ambassador from a world where films are made free of commercial imperatives, indeed from a world where the shallow values of celebrity and wealth are replaced by the co …Read more

Graduation is an intricately detailed look at one man, through entirely good intentions, falling into an abyss of moral compromise. In the film’s painstaking portrayal of one decision and its disastrous aftermath, director Cristian Mungiu condemns al …Read more

Sky Ladder has one of the better opening lines I’ve heard in a movie all year. We are told (through subtitles) that many centuries ago, while searching for a substance that would give them immortality, the Chinese discovered dynamite. What a great ex …Read more