In a world where most episodic directors tend to specialize in hour-long dramas or half-hour comedies—and some specialize even further within those formats, becoming known for procedurals or prestige dramas or multi-cam sitcoms—Matt Shakman might be the most versatile filmmaker working in television today. He has directed one of the funniest comedies on TV (It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia), one of the largest scale and most popular premium cable series (Game of Thrones) and was behind some of the best episodes of Succession, Fargo and Mad Men. As comfortable with network crowd-pleasers like The Good Wife as he is at the […]

Director Kari Skogland has long been a master of tonally complex television, having helmed episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale, Boardwalk Empire, The Walking Dead and many other beloved series; she also executive produced and directed several episodes of one of the best limited series of the last ten years, the Showtime Roger Ailes drama The Loudest Voice. Yet the best work of her career is her most recent, as the director of all six episodes of Marvel’s Disney+ series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. An extraordinarily ambitious expansion of the Marvel universe that takes full advantage of the opportunities television […]

One of director Joe Dante’s most interesting and underrated films gets the Blu-ray treatment it deserves with the Shout Factory release of Explorers, Dante’s 1985 follow-up to Gremlins that walks a similarly unconventional line between Spielbergian sentiment and Tashlinesque pop satire, with an undercurrent of unsettling melancholy thrown in for good measure. There’s genuine warmth and wonder to spare in the first half of the film as friends Ethan Hawke, River Phoenix, and Jason Presson build their own spaceship; when they actually manage to rendezvous with the aliens who have been communicating with them, the movie shifts gears to become […]

Showrunner David Weil’s Amazon series Hunters was one of the most audacious pieces of television I saw in 2020, a profound meditation on morality and history articulated with the exhilarating narrative rush of a great genre film. Epic in its sweep and ambition, the show made me eager to see what Weil would do next—where does a filmmaker go after such a bold swing for the fences? The answer turned out to be Weil’s new show (also for Amazon) Solos, which operates at the other end of the spectrum in terms of scale but is just as daring in its […]

Writer-director Eugene Ashe was a successful musician before he started making films, a background evident in every exquisite frame of Sylvie’s Love. Not just because male lead Robert (Nnamdi Asomugha) is a saxophonist and the movie features the best jazz soundtrack since ’Round Midnight, and not just because female lead Sylvie (Tessa Thompson) begins the film working in her dad’s record store and has an encyclopedic knowledge of music and knows how to tailor recommendations to each customer. The musical influence goes beyond these considerations to inform every texture and detail of Ashe’s late ’50s-early ’60s set drama, a gloriously […]

One of the great American films of the early 2000s hits Blu-ray for the first time with Imprint’s exceptional special edition of Mark Pellington’s The Mothman Prophecies (2002), a truly unique thriller that has only improved with age. Loosely based on true events, The Mothman Prophecies follows a Washington Post reporter (Richard Gere) who finds himself at the center of a series of inexplicable supernatural events following his wife’s tragic death. Although Pellington explicitly set out to avoid making a conventional horror film – there are very few glimpses of the title creature and no gratuitous shocks – the movie […]

I’ve written here before about my fondness for director Michael Ritchie, particularly his streak in the 1970s when he made one great movie after another about the dark side of the American competitive spirit. Most of his best films – Downhill Racer (1969), The Candidate (1972), The Bad News Bears (1976) – are wry meditations on what it really means to win (and lose) in a culture where winning is valued above all else; one of the most memorable moments in all of his work comes at the conclusion of The Candidate, when Robert Redford’s senatorial candidate wins his election […]

Director Maja Vrvilo began her career as an editor, and her former job is consistently manifest in her economy of visual expression, impeccably calibrated pacing and use of montage to convey interior states. I first became aware of Vrvilo when she was directing on Hawaii Five-0, a series that made me sit up and take notice of her kinetic action staging and lively handling of actors. That led me to her episodes of Blindspot, MacGyver and other procedurals that all exhibited the sophisticated blocking and precise compositions I quickly realized were hallmarks of her filmmaking. Last year Vrvilo helmed two superb […]

When film buffs talk about early sound horror films, they tend to associate the period with Universal and its justly famous monster movies. Yet at around the same time, Michael Curtiz directed three important horror pictures at Warner Brothers, the first two of which are far more transgressive, disturbing, and graphic than anything to come out of Universal City. Doctor X (1932), Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), and The Walking Dead (1936) aren’t as iconic as later Curtiz classics like The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Casablanca (1942), and White Christmas (1954), but they’re every bit as atmospheric and […]

When writer, director, and film historian Bertrand Tavernier passed away on March 25, the art of cinema lost one of its most eloquent, passionate, and informed partisans. Thankfully, his last great work, the eight-hour documentary series Journeys Through French Cinema, is newly available on Blu-ray from Cohen Media Group and provides a beautiful summation of Tavernier’s devotion and an enlightening introduction to many of his favorite filmmakers. The documentary is a follow-up to Tavernier’s 2016 theatrical feature My Journey Through French Cinema and essentially picks up where that movie left off, exploring directors, actors, composers, and other artists Tavernier wasn’t […]