“French dancers gather in a remote, empty school building to rehearse on a wintry night. The all-night celebration morphs into a hallucinatory nightmare when they learn their sangria is laced with LSD,” reads IMDB’s plot summary of French filmmaker Gaspar Noé’s latest cinematic creation, “Climax.” What this plot summary, and any summary of the film…
“Captain Marvel” is a movie in an awkward position. The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) demands that it establish its most powerful, explosive superhero yet, explain Nick Fury’s eye, indicate the first hints of the Avengers, explore an Infinity Stone and introduce Ronin the Accuser (who we see in the “Guardians of the Galaxy” movie), all…
“Quality Flix” reads the opening logo in Dinesh D’Souza’s latest documentary. The first strike against “Death of a Nation”: false advertising. It was the first of many to come; this is a documentary that purports to expose Democrats as the true fascist racists in American society through a series of reductio ad absurda and reductio ad…
During “The Age of Innocence” at the end of the 19th century, a select set of New Yorkers naively emulated Europeans. To this end, they held balls that would make Queen Victoria blush, imported the latest fashions from Paris and attended operas and plays that had already graced foreign stages. They created an elaborate system of…
First impressions from the Daily staff after watching the Academy Awards: “an emotional rollercoaster,” “very commercialized,” “I’m not surprised that Green Book won” and “‘Buster Scruggs’ was robbed.” Mine was not fit for print. Let’s not undersell the 2019 Oscars. There were plenty of adorable moments, from Olivia Colman’s flabbergasted speech to Spike Lee’s ecstatic…
The collection of the 2019 Oscar-nominated live-action short films revolve around themes of youth, masculinity, family, motherhood and ultimately, as Oscar-nominated projects often do, the human experience. “Fauve,” “Detainment” and “Skin” place young boys at the center of their stories, while “Marguerite” and “Madre” feature only women on screen (“Marguerite” also being the only nominated…
Watching “Happy Death Day 2U” was a surreal experience that I still can’t quite wrap my head around. I thoroughly enjoyed the first film — its humorous spin on the slasher genre presented a certain self-awareness that I appreciate in modern cinema. However, having seen the trailers for the second film, I went in with…
Maybe the bricks were stacked against the “Lego Movie 2: The Second Part” from the start. Normally, it’d be odd to doubt the comedy talent of writers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller in the sequel to an award-winning blockbuster. But 2014 was a long time ago. Long enough, perhaps, for people to forget what Lord…
