movies

The Farewell.(Photo: A24 Films)Every time a friend tells me they're seeing their grandma for Christmas or having their uncle over for dinner, I feel a small pang. As a second-generation immigrant—I was born in the United States to…

The documentary “Honeyland,” about a beekeeper in rural Macedonia whose livelihood is threatened by the actions of new neighbors, has many of the virtues of a good dramatic feature. Its narrative construction depicts extraordinary…

The internet was set ablaze on Jul. 18, 2019 when the first, sierra hotel trailer for Top Gun: Maverick debuted. As reported by Washington Business Journal, we still must wait a year for the finished product to hit the screen, but we…

Documentary portraiture often veers toward celebrity journalism, as a celebration and a tribute. It’s not surprising—a filmmaker’s choice of subject also involves the subject’s willing participation. Yet at its best that transactional…

The very notion of a director’s first feature is at the core of cinematic modernity, because the first director whose first feature is is synonymous with both his artistic acclaim and a revolution in the art form is Orson Welles, with…

On a recent Sunday afternoon, Cage in the Park, a theatre series created by Sebastian DiNatale and Zachary DiLanzo, staged a Shakespearean reënactment of the 1997 action film “Face/Off,” at the Grecian peristyle at the southern end of…

Midsommar.(Photo: A24)Ari Aster makes scary movies. The times we're in make them even scarier. Aster isn't a political filmmaker by any traditional definition, but the two features he's directed—last year's Hereditary and the stunning…

Ari Aster is a writer and director of cult movies—his two features, “Hereditary,” from 2018, and “Midsommar,” which opened last week, are both grotesque and gory dramas about cults. “Hereditary” showed a family’s destruction by an…

“Drop Dead Gorgeous,” the mockumentary about a teen-age beauty pageant in the fictional town of Mount Rose, Minnesota, was released in 1999. Made for somewhere between ten and fifteen million dollars, it earned just ten and a half…

“Spider-Man: Far from Home,” starring Tom Holland as the Queens teen-ager Peter Parker, rapidly intertwines the big events that capped the “Avengers” cycle—Thanos’s mass obliteration of half of humanity and of half the Avengers, in…