The Film Gang from KSQD

  Movie award season is inherently ephemeral. Even diehard film buffs would be hard pressed to recall all of the winners at this year‘s Oscar ceremony, let alone the nominees, and the nominations for Best International Feature seem to fade from memory the quickest. One little slice of movie nirvana in danger of being soon […]

  Attempting a remake of a great movie is more often than not a fool’s errand. You can forgive some filmmakers for trying to share their fanboy obsessions with a new generation, like Peter Jackson did with King Kong or Steven Spielberg with West Side Story. It’s not as easy to forgive those who try […]

  If you are a horror film aficionado, chances are you’ve heard of Julia Ducournau, whose 2016 breakout movie, Raw, became an instant cult hit. Despite its mutilations and cannibalism, Ducournau used Raw to explore benevolent themes such as family and love. With her long-awaited second feature, Titane, Ducournau takes a look at the same themes […]

  With its smart writing and edgy storytelling, The Worst Person in the World towers above the vast majority of romantic comedies. It’s also the third of the so-called Oslo Trilogy written and directed by the Norwegian filmmaker, Joachim Trier. Millennial angst and relationship challenges are their primary through lines, but each film is a […]

  In 2017, Kenneth Branagh directed the opulent Murder on the Orient Express, the first in a planned series based on the Agatha Christie novels. Now he has brought the sequel, Death on the Nile, to the screen, reprising his role as Hercule Poirot, with Tom Bateman returning as Poirot’s friend Bouc. The film opens […]

    George Clooney, tv dreamboat turned elder statesman of cinema is back in the director’s chair for The Tender Bar, a sensitive tale of surviving childhood. This is Clooney’s first directing effort since 2020’s The Midnight Sky, the science fiction fable in  which he also played the lead, an aging scientist as lonely hero. […]

  Being the Ricardos, the latest film from wordsmith-turned-filmmaker Aaron Sorkin, wastes no time reminding us that long before our so-called New Golden Age of Television, the 1950’s sitcom, I Love Lucy, had, at its peak, sixty million viewers. A quick Google search reveals close to three-quarters of all American households with television sets tuned […]

  A soldier wearing camouflage fatigues inspects a darkened kitchen with his flashlight while a second soldier stands guard holding an assault rifle. “All clear. Bring it in,” radios the first. The scene switches to a caravan of army trucks making their way towards one of Queen Elizabeth’s residences, the Sandringham House in Norfolk, England. […]

  It has been 12 years since writer-director Jane Campion’s last film. Now, Campion returns with a feminist vengeance, with the Power of the Dog.  The first female director nominated for the Academy Award, for The Piano in ’94, we can all be grateful Campion shelved plans for retirement when she read the reissue of […]

  Despite all of the critical acclaim the French-Canadian filmmaker Dennis Villeneuve has accrued over the years, his name often goes unrecognized, and his excellent 2014 psychological thriller, Enemy, is still relatively unknown. Villeneuve was determined to make Enemy following the success of his 2010 Oscar-nominated foreign language film, Incendies, which brought him worldwide attention [&...

  Last September, Daniel Craig’s swan song as James Bond was finally released after being held back nearly two years due to the global pandemic, making its title, No Time to Die, more than a little ironic. Directed and co-written by former UCSC slug Cary Fukunaga, No Time to Die is now available on home […]

  Wrapping oneself up in the warm blanket of nostalgia has always been an alluring proposition. Cult filmmaker Edgar Wright provides a corrective to those rose-colored cravings with Last Night in Soho, a creepy ghost story with a twist. Thomasin McKenzie stars as Eloise, a small-town U.K. girl with a supernatural gift for seeing things […]

  Paul Thomas Anderson is one of our great contemporary auteurs. Case in point, his 2007 film, There Will Be Blood, is frequently cited as a masterpiece of 21st century filmmaking. His latest movie, Licorice Pizza, is a sweet, funny, occasionally poignant, and completely original coming-of-age story that follows the lives of two young people […]

  Another remake of a classic film has come to town, pitching its tent like a carnival of the grotesque. Fans of film noir will immediately recognize the title of the movie it’s based on: Nightmare Alley. The original was a black & white release that hit screens in 1947 just days before Halloween. Now […]

  A single man gets a taste of parenthood in C’mon C’mon, the new indie drama written and directed by Mike Mills. Joaquin Phoenix stars as Johnny, a radio journalist working in Detroit on a project involving children responding to big questions about life. When his sister, Viv, played by Gaby Hoffmann, has to leave […]

  It’s Belfast, 1969, and rioting Protestants are invading a peaceful Catholic neighborhood. A Molotov cocktail explodes in front of an eight-year-old boy while he’s standing in the middle of the street, paralyzed with fear. His name is Buddy, and ironically he’s the youngest son of a Protestant family that lives peacefully alongside those now […]

  It doesn’t take very long to recognize a Wes Anderson film. His tenth feature, The French Dispatch, takes his go-to formula – wide-angle lenses, symmetrical compositions, deadpan humor, and whimsy that occasionally oversteps into the land of twee – and spikes it with steroids. Brimming with new and returning talent, including Adrien Brody, Benicio […]

  Christopher Nolan is one of those rare filmmakers who routinely make high concept genre films with massive budgets, usually in the service of exploring two of his pet obsessions – the amorphous nature of identity and the subjectivity of time. Because his box office success allows him to realize his unique visions unencumbered by […]

  On a remote farm in Iceland, a middle-aged couple works a sheep farm. Their marriage appears to be solid, even though the woman, María, seems a tad discontent compared to her husband, Ingvar. They both work long hard days made even longer by the midnight sun. Neither need to talk – each knows their […]

  Hearing the title of the 2017 film, I Am Not a Witch, might conjure up pop culture memories of a woman accused of witchcraft in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The Python’s absurdist test to determine if the accused is a witch was to see if she weighed the same as a duck. […]

  The Del Mar Theatre is back in business, and so is Paul Schrader with his new film, The Card Counter. Schrader’s stories often revolve around deeply damaged souls, their vices symptomatic of their troubled psyches; violence in Raging Bull, sex in Auto Focus, and alcohol in First Reformed. In The Card Counter, it’s gambling. […]

  Does Nicolas Cage have a thing for pigs and film noir? Possibly, considering he voiced the character of Spider-Man Noir opposite the animated pig, Spider-Ham. And now he’s starring in Pig, a compelling crime drama that makes liberal use of classic film noir tropes. Cage plays Rob, a legendary Portland-based gourmet chef who has […]

  In the mid-1960s, the New York Times published an exposé on Dan Burrows, a member of the American Nazi Party. As one might expect, Burrows held a deep-seated hatred towards Jews. What made his anti-Semitism so newsworthy was that Burrows kept his cultural heritage a closely guarded secret. Burrows, the New York Times revealed, […]

  Writer, director, and former UCSC Slug, Miranda July, burst onto the indie film scene in 2005 with Me and You and Everyone We Know. It won prizes at prestigious film festivals such as Sundance and Cannes, and July would be declared by Filmmaker magazine as one of the new faces of indie cinema. Talented […]

  For the longest time, ‘80s cinema was considered one of the worst decades in American film history. Compared to the gritty adult-oriented stories and antiheroes brought to the big screen by the New Hollywood auteurs of the ‘60s and ‘70s, ‘80s filmmaking represented, for the most part, a shift towards happy endings and less […]