Review: "The Lost City of Z"

by Chris Feil

A sprawling, formally immaculate epic like James Gray’s The Lost City of Z is a rare enough to seem like a novelty these days, and Gray’s rendering makes the film feel no less precious. It plays almost like a delicate jewel box on the screen, as if any minute it will crumble to our modern touch. Z looks and breathes of a bygone era.

Charlie Hunnam stars as Colonel Percival Fawcett, an unheralded military man who rises to prominence for exploring the uncharted Amazon in the early 20th century. His first expedition leads to an obsession when he discovers signs of an ancient ruins, suggesting a developed civilization previous undiscovered by western eyes. Fawcett’s three increasingly less successful journeys could be seen as indicative of the virtue or punishment of an obsessive goal, depending on your vantage.

While the film’s trajectory is familiar to epics over the most recent decades, what sets the film apart is its complex emotional terrain...

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Tribeca 2017: Dog Years

by Jason Adams

You can’t look back at the film career of Burt Reynolds and not get a lot of stink in your eye. For every Boogie Nights there’s at least two Stripteases; for every Cannonball Run there’s… another Cannonball Run.

Dog Years, which stars Burt as a Reynolds-ian movie star so past his prime he’s composite, attempts to bridge the gap between quality and its opposite with some erratic shifts in tone – one second it’s an unblinking portrait of the 80-plus year realities of Burt Reynolds face, and the next it’s a broad goof with pratfalls. I prefer the former tone, but I get the latter – the latter makes sense with who Burt Reynolds has been for forty years on our screens...

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RuPaul's Drag Race S9E5 - Kardashi-lame

by Chris Feil

This season of RuPaul’s Drag Race has a celebrity problem.

I had complained about the show taking attention away from the queens and making the show all about famous faces at the beginning of the season. However, this episode was the most egregious offender for being starstruck by celebrities who weren’t even there! The main challenge was a mini-musical on the Kardashian family, an overlong performance that spread our time with the girls much too thin. But let’s not jump ahead for the sake of complaining!

We actually did get what has been missing from the season so far: a mini-challenge and the Pit Crew! The gals got into quick drag for a swimsuit selfie with the boys (including new Crew members Jared and Yadir), with the girls being shockingly tame. Alexis took a much needed win, but I’d have given the Instagram like to gorgeous goofball Valentina for insisting Ru announce her as Miss Venezuela. Yes, my frost for her is thawing.

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"You think just because I'm a movie star I don't have feelings."

...well, you're wrong!"

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Review: "Free Fire"

by Chris Feil

At first look, Ben Wheatley’s Free Fire seems like another Tarantino retread, all snarky hyper-violence with a wink that we’ve seen dozens of times - and to some degree it is. But the film isn’t so much the macho wankfest it will be shrugged off as, nor the cornucopia of gun adoration that the marketing promises. Where Free Fire delights, even charms, is by finding its thrills in the shady repartee and double crosses between criminals rather than the bloodshed. 

Guns do play the central role in the film’s “deal gone wrong”, but they aren't responsible for what makes things go south...

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