This past weekend, American moviegoers were treated to the wide release of TÁR, the director Todd Field’s first feature film in more than 16 years. To help unpack this complex and divisive study of the […]
Tag: Reviews
The Strawberry Criterion: JOKER
Few works of art are less dangerous than a work of art billed as “dangerous,” especially when the ones doing the billing are the feckless, fangless goobers of contemporary cinema’s critical class. Since its premiere, […]
BPoFD Recommends: Fruition of the Damned — Emergence
Near the beginning of Emergence, the second book in Keenan Carola and Jeremy McKinnon’s Fruition of the Damned graphic novel series, our young hero, Leafio, stands before a mountain at the bottom of an ocean. From the peak, […]
The Strawberry Criterion: MIDSOMMAR
At least to date, the horror films of Ari Aster have shown two principal areas of interest, grief and cults, topics the writer-director tends to explore in that same, deliberate order. In Hereditary, his debut feature […]
The Strawberry Criterion: A Star is Born
The genealogy of A Star is Born, Bradley Cooper’s directorial debut, traces an indirect lineage back to the dawn of American cinema, with three remakes and nine decades separating this most recent version from its oldest […]
The Strawberry Criterion: Ready Player One
The protagonist of Ready Player One, the new Steven Spielberg movie, plays video games as an avatar named “Parzival,” who all the other characters inexplicably call “Z.” This would be like having a friend named “Daniel” […]
The Strawberry Criterion: Phantom Thread
The acclaimed dressmaker at the center of Phantom Thread, the new film from Paul Thomas Anderson, sews cryptic notes into the seams of his creations, secret messages never to be glimpsed by any eyes but his […]
The Strawberry Criterion: The Last Jedi
As there is matter and anti-matter, can there be film and anti-film? If the satisfaction of certain aesthetic and formal criteria can be said to make a film “recognizable,” what would an absolute failure to […]
What’s Worse Than GIRLS?
by David Salinas Full disclosure: I haven’t watched GIRLS since the third season. I think. And I’m not sure it matters. The plot is so insignificant—characters shuffling between love, languor, and leases—that whole seasons meld into […]
baby pictures of famous dictators 