By Will Sloan In the weeks leading up to The Boy and the Heron’s Japanese release in July, Studio Ghibli offered no stills, no trailers, no clips—just a poster (with a hand-drawn image of a heron) and the promise that its beloved maker, Hayao Miyazaki, was back. That the film was a monster hit speaks…

By Will Sloan Back during the height of the pandemic, when the fall prestige releases included a movie where Lucille Ball proved she was not a communist and an adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy (2020), I often wondered if the American film industry would ever get around to addressing the overwhelming poverty and despair of the…

By Will Sloan Opening with an early-‘70s MPAA disclaimer, and layering film speckles over its opening titles, The Holdovers wastes no time announcing itself as The Sort Of Movie They Don’t Make Anymore. Six years after the poor reception that greeted his audacious Downsizing (2017), Alexander Payne’s return is as comfortable and familiar as an…

By Will Sloan  Failure and frustration are a spectrum, not a binary. Xavier (Atibon Nazaire), a Haitian immigrant in Miami, has worked hard and faithfully for a Miami construction company for many years, and his efforts have rewarded him with a small house in the Little Haiti neighbourhood. There, with his seamstress wife Esperance (Sheila…

By Will Sloan Saying “a camp for queer youth in rural Alberta” tends to summon an image of something very different from Camp fYrefly, the three-day retreat for teens who self-identity across the queer and trans spectrum. This documentary chronicles one such retreat, during which friendships are made, shy kids emerge from their shells, kids…

Paul Schrader’s career has been eclectic enough to encompass biopics of Mishima Yukio, Bob Crane, and Patricia Hearst; adaptations of books by Ian McEwan, Russell Banks, and Nikos Kazantzakis; genre films that meet the expectations of the horror, thriller, and romance forms; and star vehicles tailored to bring out the best in icons as disparate at Richard Pryor, Richard Gere, George C. Scott, and Lindsay Lohan.

By Will Sloan Because entertainment monopolies have plastered every visible surface of our cultural landscape with superheroes, a widespread perception has taken root that these characters constitute “our modern myths.” The companies themselves have helped foster this idea with such postmodern movies as The LEGO Movie (2014) and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018), which state…

By Will Sloan Steven Spielberg has made at least ten movies that have become part of American folklore, and has ascended to the very highest echelon of society, so if there’s any living filmmaker whose perspective on himself and his work are of interest, it’s him. The chief insight that his cinematic self-portrait/origin myth The…

By Will Sloan  Another modest sex comedy from the creative team behind My Awkward Sexual Adventure (2012), The End of Sex shifts its comedy-of-awkwardness to middle-age. After sending their two adolescent daughters to camp, long-married couple Josh (Jonas Chernick) and Emma (Emily Hampshire) finally have the time and space to revive their long-dormant sex life.…

By Will Sloan I haven’t really kept up with Weird Al Yankovic’s music since I was a kid, but I did listen to it a lot back then, to the extent that I can’t hear “Gangster’s Paradise” or “MacArthur Park” without immediately thinking of his parodies. I know a lot of people who feel the…

By Will Sloan  This loose adaptation of Andreas Malm’s 2021 memoir/manifesto about the political necessity of property destruction is aimed directly at the zeitgeist. Hoping to price fossil fuel out of the market, a diverse crew of Zoomer activists from the lower rungs of the economic ladder collaborate on a plot to destroy a crucial…

By Will Sloan  “In the village, they all call you the strange one,” says the future author of Jane Eyre to the future author of Wuthering Heights in this speculative biopic of Emily Brontë. More reclusive and less well-documented than her elder sister, Emily Brontë’s inner life has invited universes of speculation since her passing…

By Will Sloan There has been much discourse in recent years about how best to “hold accountable” those whose wealth and privilege insulates them from the traditional levers of justice. The question is key to Laura Poitras’s documentary profile of Nan Goldin, which foregrounds the legendary photographer’s fight against the Sackler family, whose pharmaceutical empire…

One time I was leaving Jack Ford’s house because I had a present I wanted to deliver to John Wayne. I told Ford, “It’s Duke’s birthday, I’m going over to give him a book.” “Eh?” he said. Sometimes Ford liked to pretend he was hard of hearing. So I repeated: “It’s Duke’s birthday, I’m going over to give him a book.” “Eh?” he said again. “It’s Duke’s birthday, I’m going over to give him a book.” Then a long pause. Ford says, “Duke’s already got a book.”