My favorites? The personal cinema of John Cassavetes, the minimalist film noir of Jean-Pierre Melville and that early period of New Hollywood in the 70s (of course Polanski and Coppola.) I also focus on directors working today like the Safdie Brothers, Paolo Sorrentino, Jane Campion, Denis Villeneuve, Jordan Peele, Emma Seligman, David Cronenberg, and Hong Sang-soo.
At Columbia University, I specialized in media studies and cultural criticism. Here I was exposed to the great cultural critics of the 20th Century: Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Jean Baudrillard, Jonathan Rosenbaum and more. Although I disagreed with many of their takes, Sontag’s formalism and Kael’s socio-political commentary became the bedrock of my critical lens for movies.
But I'm also wary of the sort of ivory tower academicism that divorced many critics from audiences in the mid-century. I always kept an ear to the ground as a PA in film production and press & venue staffer at film festivals in New York. Twitter — while a very imperfect tool — has also become an essential data point for the modern movie critic, and I often report on my impressions of the online discourse there in my reviews.
In 2022, I set a challenge to watch and review a new movie every day. In addition to the long form reviews written below, I have catalogued nearly 1000 reviews on my Letterboxd (@msxviii). I hope you follow me on this journey!
The most impressive element of Athena, Romain Gavras‘ protest epic turned Greek tragedy, is the cinematography by Matias Boucard, whose...
A Ballad of Liberal Democracy & the Tendrils of Glass Tyrants... In the port city of Thessaloniki in 1963, a high profile political...
Commercial Auteurism... I grew up in the early 2000s and my first memory of a summer blockbuster on the big screen is Michael Bay's...
An Unwieldy Satire of the Art World... In a couple of scenes in The Square, Ruben Östlund's supposed satire of the art world, we witness...
How to Make a Political Film... Cristian Mungiu first made waves in the international festival circuit with his political film 4 Months,...
Documenting the Price of Dissent... The energizing tightrope act at the heart of The Exiles (2022) is balancing Christine Choy’s...
Don't Worry Darling (2022) has all the makings of a Gen Z smash hit; a talented lead actress who appeared in the biggest horror movie of...
It's an exhilarating trap of the horror genre that it can exploit fears and paranoias unique to a specific time to weaponize an...
Born during the Disney Renaissance, I grew up on mostly American animation yet every now and then an episode of late 90s Pokémon would...
The key to understanding what First Reformed tries to achieve is Schrader’s identification with slow cinema. In interviews, Paul Schrader...
There is a gallery of moments in the history of horror that have seared themselves into the public dread like the folklore of yore. The...
The best thing about Abel Ferrara's hyper-stylish 1990 neo-noir King of New York is that it's so damn cool. The script is sloppy in...
Mad God follows a gas-masked protagonist as he descends into a psychotic nightmare in search of an object on his map. It's hard to...
Five Easy Pieces is the sophomore feature of Manhattan-born director Bob Rafelson, released in 1970, a year before he produced Peter...
On Saturday night, I attended the 18th annual East Hampton Author’s Night in a tented pavilion in Herrick Park. I heard it referred to as...
In his 2016 feature Paterson, indie legend Jim Jarmusch follows the daily hum drum of a poet bus driver (played by Adam Driver) as he...
At the 3rd annual Montauk Film Festival on July 26th, I attended the director's panel and screenings of four films: Cracked, Wasted...
At the 3rd annual Montauk Film Festival on Monday night, I attended the director's panel and screenings of five shorts: The Weedy One,...
At the 3rd annual Montauk Film Festival on Sunday night, I attended the director's panel and screenings of four inventive and sharp...
It's rare that a father-son duo becomes renowned in their respective crafts to the degree that impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste...