Animated Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse uses unique, groundbreaking animation techniques and engages with the most 'out-there' comic book concepts to tell a hilarious, relatable, timely coming-of-age story
Directors Claude Sautet and Andrzej Zulawski turn the camera's gaze on the glorious Romy Schneider in these four drama, romance, and crime films available from Film Movement and Kino Lorber.
Spike Lee's Da 5 Bloods engages with the notion of perpetual conflict. But how well does it fit into the current social milieu of demonstrations against police violence?
James Wan's supernatural ventriloquism film, Dead Silence, was buried alive in the catacombs of cinema's history by a mountain of awful reviews upon its release. But its take on the horrors of misogyny may compel you to watch it now.
While philosopher Stanley Cavell endeavors to show that we must mean what we say in a very important sense, Godard's Bruno Forestier of Le Petit Soldat suggests that we simply cannot and must not mean what we say.
This year's 'digital edition' of Human Rights Watch's consistently engaging and enraging collection of documentaries is at its best when spotlighting the activists fighting to make humanity more human.
Ruben Fleischer's toothless antihero film, Venom is like a blockbuster from 15 years earlier: one-dimensional, loose plot, inconsistent tone, and packaged in the least-offensive, most mass appeal way possible. Sigh.
The passage of time tends to make old films more interesting, such as these seven films of the late '40s and '50s from British directors John Boulting, Carol Reed, David Lean, Anthony Kimmins, Charles Frend, Guy Hamilton, and Leslie Norman.
What if I told you that the director of one of the most heartwarming and beloved Christmas movies of all time is the same director as probably the most terrifying and disturbing yuletide horror films of all time?
Alastair Sim belongs to those character actors sometimes accused of "hamming it up" because they work at such a high level of internal and external technique that they can't help standing out.
The works of silent filmmakers Alice Guy Blaché and Julia Crawford Ivers were at risk of being forever lost. Kino Lorber offers their works on Blu-Ray. Three cheers for film historians and film restoration.
Streaming services and large TV screens have really hurt movie theaters and now the coronavirus pandemic has shuttered multiplexes and arthouses. The author of The Perils of Moviegoing in America, however, is optimistic.
These WWII films from directors Alberto Cavalcanti, Guy Hamilton, Michael Anderson, Leslie Norman and J. Lee Thomson are excellent studies in history, filmmaking, and wartime propaganda.
The many symbols throughout Stoker should be viewed as parts of a puzzle to be solved -- or not.
Peyton Reed's "Disney-fied" Ant-Man and the Wasp is unchallenging in all the best ways.
While all films project a world that might be, certain films and certain filmmakers, like Karel Zeman, come closer than others in bringing to the surface the underlying phantasmagoric essence of cinema.
The first half of Deadpool 2, in which Vanessa is murdered and Wade becomes purposeless and suicidal, is a slog. The second half, where Wade commits to defending an angry teenage mutant, positively soars with fantastic action and some of the funniest superhero film moments in years.
The focus on Thanos single-handedly saves Avengers: Infinity War from becoming the overstuffed mess many feared and lends the film a relentless action pace more akin to Mad Max: Fury Road than a superhero blockbuster.
Bong Joon-ho's scathing Parasite reflects Montesquieu's critique that the decline of civic virtue causes great social inequality, which then incurs greed, envy, and violence.
"Son, you got a panty on your head." As purveyors of gallows humor, filmmakers the Coen Brothers teach us how to laugh at things that aren't funny -- but kinda are.
Inspired by D.W. Griffith's Intolerance, Vsevolod Pudovkin would leave his chemistry studies for cinema. His films Mother, The End of St. Petersburg, and Storm over Asia are presented in The Bolshevik Trilogy.
Through a brazen performance, one to obliterate all performances that came before, Isabelle Adjani gives her Claudel a true body in which to house all her drive and desire in Bruno Nuytten's Camille Claudel.
Bhogwan Singh performed with snakes for a beach sideshow in Los Angeles before he got his chance with Universal Studios to fix Rudolf Valentino's turban.
In her 1970 avant-garde short Fly, Yoko Ono works within the same parameters as directors like Alfred Hitchcock or Takashi Miike. Yet, she posits the intermixture of her celluloid images as reconstructive effort, not a destructive one.
Ryan Coogler's Black Panther engages with deep and timely social, cultural, and psychological concepts, and completely taps into America's zeitgeist.
Tennis and cinema, united in their dramatization of time's passage, are about expanding the possibilities of what can happen in a single moment. To McEnroe's frustration, the camera captures and scrutinizes every detail of his performance.
There are mythical moments in Almodóvar's All About My Mother. We are meant to register repetition in the story as something wonderfully strange, a connection across the chasm of impossibility.
Taika Waititi's Thor: Ragnarok takes a refreshingly iconoclastic approach to Thor, throwing out the old, bringing in the new, and packaging the story in a colourful, gorgeously trashy aesthetic that perfectly captures the spirit of the comics.
The character's in Claude Chabrol's The Third Lover, Line of Demarcation, and The Champagne Murders are obsessively doubled and mirrored, reflecting and refracting their hunger for sex, love, money, and power.
We are afraid of time, and so like Leonard in Memento, we kill it, compulsively and indiscriminately.
The imaginative filmmaker Karel Zeman influenced many artists including Terry Gilliam, Tim Burton, fellow Czech Jan Švankmajer, the Brothers Quay, and animator Lawrence Jordan's recycling of classic 19th Century imagery.
Chantal Akerman's 1968 short film Saute ma ville directly reflects our current state, serving as a meditative text on the art of staying home.
The teen-focused, John Hughes-inspired approach not only makes Spider-Man: Homecoming feel fresh in the realm of Spider-Man films, but in superhero films in general.
French thrillers Diabolically Yours, Farewell Friend, and Un Flic star the handsome and controversial tough guy, Alain Delon, whose off-screen persona was not unlike his hard bastard characters.
Kino Lorber's Forbidden Fruit: The Golden Age of the Exploitation Picture series highlights exploitation films that aim to strike a blow for truth and health against censorship and narrow fuddy-duddies.
It's the little things that make and break marriages and movies. In the case of Baumbach's Marriage Story, it's 25 little things.
Silent film A Cottage on Dartmoor brilliantly captures Anthony Asquith's fascination with the French impressionists' preoccupation with the still, singled out expression.
© 1999-2020 PopMatters.com. All rights reserved.
PopMatters is wholly independent, women-owned and operated.
