A List by John Purcell It is difficult to make a definitive list of Los Angeles films so this is a work in progress. There are too many…
Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood is an indulgent romp through bygone Hollywood, reaching its climax on August 6, 1969, night of the Manson family’s infamous Sharon Tate…
The 15:17 to Paris chronicles the true-life story of U.S. First Class Airman Spencer Stone, along with U.S. Army Specialist Alek Skarlatos and their mutual friend Anthony Sadler, who played…
On a show where the hard-working, virtuous, “good” families are the lily-white Hortons and Bradys, and the criminal, selfish “bad” families are of a darker hue (the Greek-American Kiriakises and…
A Review of Hulu’s Catch-22 and Prognostications for Netflix’s One Hundred Years of Solitude Once upon a time, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller was, according to Vanity Fair, “one of the…
With the releases of Drive (2011, Refn) and Baby Driver (2017, Wright), American audiences saw two non-American directors, a Dane and a Brit, take on a quintessential American sub-genre, a…
This summer marks the 15th anniversary of Napoleon Dynamite, a film so unique and divisive that computer scientists now use the term, “Napoleon Dynamite problem” to describe the difficulty of predicting an eccentric…
Religious pluralism is a cultural value Americans once took for granted. Their government, which endeavored to be different from the crowns that colonized wide swaths of world under the guise…
As the daughter of a CIA agent, I usually roll my eyes at spy thrillers. They’re highly unrealistic, especially when it comes to portraying family members—like in the Americans when the daughter,…
Woman at War | dir. Benedikt Erlingsson | Iceland It’s a war film without the blood and guts It’s a climate change comedy thriller It’s Kill Bill’s Icelandic sister…
In the third season of True Detective, Nic Pizzolatto has expertly circumnavigated the bait-and-switch prerogatives we’ve come to expect with the genre of true crime; he’s played on our perverse…
Part of being an artist is the struggle. The struggle to create, the struggle to find inspiration, the struggle to be. Perhaps that’s why not many of us make it…
Here are just a few of the amazing films we couldn’t cover by the Oscars deadline. Do yourself a favor and watch one (or two!) of these tonight. It’s not…