How do you turn “Fear Street” into a movie or even three? For decades, YA horror author R.L. Stine has been frightening readers with dozens of spooky stories about teens in peril that often tips into the paranormal. Spoiled for choice, writer/director Leigh Janiak forged a bold new path. Coming off of the critical acclaim…

Steven Soderbergh returns to HBO Max this week with a phenomenal genre exercise, an old-fashioned film with one of the sharpest ensembles he’s ever assembled (which is really saying something). Once again, he is interrogating power structures—a theme of films like “High Flying Bird,” “Traffic,” “The Girlfriend Experience,” and so many other greats—embedding sharp social…

If you were on Twitter on October 27, 2015, you probably became aware of an epic Twitter thread unfolding in real time, going viral at the speed of light. The thread was by a woman named A’Ziah King (aka “Zola”) and started with four pictures of Zola and another woman, preening for selfies, with the…

Not since the revolutionary spirit of ’68 stopped the Cannes International Film Festival in its tracks with demonstrations and rowdy antics spearheaded by French New Wave filmmakers including Jean-Luc Godard, has any global event impacted this glitziest of all intersections of cinematic high art and commercial culture. Not until the worldwide COVID-19 crisis of 2020 that…

I wanted to take a minute to lament that among the other things we’ve been denied in the last ten years, we lost a flourishing and formally exciting cinema for teenagers. In the mid-’90s there was a huge surge in movies made for young women that were also appealing to other audiences because they were…

As a matter of principle, we don’t usually publish a full press release, but I am making an exception to congratulate Matthew Helderman and Bondit on the tenth anniversary of their company, Buffalo 8. I have watched them grow over the years from the little company that could to what they are today. Included below is a…