Ed Gonzalez
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Articles by Ed Gonzalez
‘La Bola Negra’ Review: Los Javis’ Epic Tribute to Lorca Placates Spain’s Collective Guilt
Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi’s La Bola Negra is a film of ruptures, and it begins with its most striking one. In 1937, in a small Andalusian village, pro-nationalist locals have gathered to celebrate the arrival of their Italian allies. But revelry quickly turns to tragedy when Benito Mussolini’s fascist planes fire on the villagers, an unfortunate accident that will forever change the course of young trumpet player Sebastián’s (Guitarricadelafuente) life.
‘Elsinore’ Review: Andrew Scott Makes Ian Charleson’s Hamlet Dream Felt, If Not Understood
Simon Stone’s Elsinore, which takes its name from the castle in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, is a fascinatingly confused brushstroke of a film. There’s a circumscribed quality to this biopic about Scottish actor Ian Charleson, who died of AIDS in 1990 and is best remembered for his starring role in the 1981 historical drama Chariots of Fire.
‘Ben’Imana’ Review: A Haunting, If Stilted, Portrait of Rwandans Grappling with Genocide’s Toll
Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo’s debut feature, Ben’Imana, is many things, but primarily it’s a corrective. Set in Kibeho, a mountainous village in southern Rwanda, the film shapes its action around a Gacaca justice trial. It’s nearly 20 years after the genocide against the Tutsi that left hundreds of thousands of people dead, and the intention of these ad hoc civilian tribunals is to bring the perpetrators to justice.
The Criterion Collection
Edward Yang’s Yi Yi is a moving celebration of family and cultural identity. The film’s brilliance emanates equally from its structure (the story is delicately bookended by two cultural rituals: a wedding and a funeral), the acuteness of its gaze, and Yang’s acknowledgement of life as a series of alternately humdrum and catastrophic occurrences—like a flower that blooms in the summer and wilts in the fall (he hopes you’ll notice it, because seeing is what validates its unique extraordinariness).
The Criterion Collection
Released at the height of his prolific Mexican period, Él remains one of Luis Buñuel’s crowning achievements. “Ironically, there’s absolutely nothing Mexican about Él; it’s simply the portrait of a paranoiac, who, like a poet, is born, not made,” wrote the filmmaker in his 1983 autobiography My Last Sigh.
'The Breakfast Club' 4K UHD Blu-ray Review
John Hughes’s Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is a great example of a film where the reputed hero is actually the villain. Though it’s Hughes’s finest moment as a writer and director, the film still takes for granted its upper-middle-class teen hero’s ownership of everyone and everything around him. Beneath the film’s stylistic swipes from the French New Wave is the very personification of American entitlement.
'Eyes Without a Face' 4K UHD Blu-ray Review
Considering the popular perception of the French as culturally high-minded and intellectual, it’s not surprising that the country’s film industry has produced comparably few horror movies. Such an elemental genre, it stands to reason, simply held little intrigue for filmmakers working in the wake of artistic luminaries like, say, Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson, Jacques Tati, and Jean Grémillon.
The Criterion Collection
At the heart of Jacques Audiard’s Read My Lips is the relationship between an ex-con, Paul (Vincent Cassel), and a nearly deaf, overworked secretary, Carla (Emmanuelle Devos), that’s redolent of the one between Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant’s characters in Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious. Paul recognizes Carla’s loneliness and she takes comfort in trying to make him go straight, and their interdependency gives way to a power struggle built on unspoken trust and a series of daring demands.
'Suspended Time' Exclusive Trailer Captures Life During Lockdown
Olivier Assayas’s Suspended Time premiered last year at Berlinale, where Slant’s Pat Brown wrote of the film: “By virtue of the shared experiences it speaks to, Suspended Time may be Assayas’s most universally relatable film to date.” That would be the shared experience of life during lockdown, as Assayas’s latest tells the story of how, as society recedes in the spring of 2020 due to the pandemic, a film director named Paul Berger (Vincent Macaigne) returns to his childhood home in the...
The Criterion Collection
Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat opens on an image of a gun on a desk. A man standing behind the desk grasps the weapon and raises it to his head, pulling the trigger. Throughout this curt sequence, we only see the desk, the gun, the man’s hand, the back of his head, and a stuffed envelope that’s intended to explain his actions, and which will promptly be confiscated and hidden by another character. This death sets forth a scuttling of human insects across The Big Heat.
The Criterion Collection
In a 1999 interview with LA Weekly, Armond White said, “Spike [Lee] has become a first-rate marketer—he knows what a young audience wants, and he supplies it. Spike picks hot topics—basketball, interracial dating—but that doesn’t mean you break ground. Barbara Walters picks hot topics every day.
'Grand Theft Auto VI' Second Trailer: Hot Together
The release date of Grand Theft Auto VI has been pushed more times than we can count. The reasons all make sense, but they couldn’t be any more startlingly clear than when they’re staring at you right in the face.
Mikio Naruse: The World Betrays Us
Earlier this month, it was announced that Japan Society and Metrograph had partnered on a 30-film retrospective of Japanese master Naruse Mikio, the first major survey of his work to screen in New York in 20 years.
Spike Lee's Kurosawa Reinterpretation
When the Cannes lineup was announced last month, one of the more noticeable omissions was Spike Lee’s latest joint, Highest 2 Lowest, a “reinterpretation” of Kurosawa Akira’s 1963 masterpiece High and Low. Then, one hour later, Lee took to his Instagram to confirm that that the film would indeed premiere at the festival, in the out of competition sidebar, and alongside the final Mission: Impossible film.
"There Are Many Kinds of Death"
The marketing folk over at Sony are cheeky monkeys. When I saw the email this morning announcing the new trailer for Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later, I was greeted by the desiccated face of the man who, in the film’s first trailer, was mistakingly reported to be that of Cillian Murphy. Did Jim from 28 Days Later become infected by the Rage virus?
'Sands of Iwo Jima' 4K UHD Blu-ray Review: Kino Lorber
Allan Dwan was one of Hollywood’s most prolific directors, working from the silent era through the golden age of the studio system. The Toronto-born filmmaker made somewhere north of 400 films—many of them woefully obscure, unavailable, or lost—during his career, and in a variety of genres and registers.
A Promise of Elation
Winner of the People’s Choice Award at last year’s Toronto Film Festival, one of the most reliable Oscar bellwethers, The Life of Chuck now has an official trailer.
The Criterion Collection
During the troubled production of Ashes of Time, which was supposed to be his third film, Wong Kar-wai took some time off and did what anyone in his position would do: made another movie. And he did it with a fast-paced, highly improvisatory shooting schedule, writing pages of the script during the day and shooting them at night. The result, Chungking Express, is among Wong’s most exciting films and is an early precursor to the expressive odes to romantic longing that have come to define his work.
Cannes 2025 Lineup: Richard Linklater, Ari Aster, Kelly Reichardt, and More in Competition
The guessing game around which films could make the lineup for the 78th edition of the Cannes Film Festival, which runs from May 13—24, came to an end this morning at a press conference in Paris by Cannes delegate general Thierry Frémaux and president Iris Knobloch.
Michael Sarnoski to Adapt 'Death Stranding' for A24
We’re very excited by the prospect of seeing a big-screen adaptation of Death Stranding, even if the bulk of its runtime consists of Norman Reedus trekking across Icelandic-looking landscapes while carrying weird shit inside his arsenal of carriers. And today, we find ourselves especially excited by the news that Michael Sarnorski, director of Pig and A Quiet Place: Day One, has been tapped to direct the film for A24 and Kojima Productions.
'Wolf Man' 4K UHD Blu-ray Review: UPHE
After such high-profile flops as 2010’s The Wolfman and 2017’s The Mummy, the latter of which failed to launch Universal Pictures’s intended Dark Universe franchise, came a rare standout amid the studio’s ongoing project of rebooting its classic horror movies: Leigh Wannell’s The Invisible Man, which reframed the 1933 film (based on H.G. Wells’s novel) as an extreme case of stalking and gaslighting.
Oscar 2025 Winner Predictions: Actor in a Leading Role
We admit to kicking this category down the road to see if the The Brutalist’s A.I. controversy would make any measurable ripples in this race—that is, outside the social media bubble of extremely online non-voters.
Oscar 2025 Winner Predictions: International Feature Film
Here’s one that we expected to call early on, given that Emilia Pérez’s nominations haul—a record for a non-English-language film—positioned it as more than just a sure bet in this category. But the firestorm that erupted around Karla Sofía Gascón’s social media posts forced us to kick the category down the road, so that we could look for signs that the scandal might be having measureable effects on the film’s Oscar chances here and elsewhere.
Oscar 2025 Winner Predictions: Cinematography
We’ve put too much stock on the winners of the ASC prize in past years, like when we thought that Łukasz Żal’s cinematography for Cold War would persevere over Alfonso Cuarón’s for Roma on Oscar night. That particular pick was further justified by Paweł Pawlikowski’s nomination for his direction, as there’s a strong link between films winning in this category and their being nominated for directing and, especially, best picture.
Oscar 2025 Winner Predictions: Visual Effects
Out of respect for the weekend crowd, we’re keeping this shorter than Better Man’s box office run. Besides, we need not contort ourselves into resembling the Xenomorph-human hybrid creature from Alien: Romulus to say that this race is one film’s to lose. There appears to be sentiment around Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, as the franchise has yet to win an Oscar. But this is a category that significantly favors best picture nominees.
Oscar 2025 Winner Predictions: Original Screenplay
Welcome to episode two of “How Many Oscars Will Sean Baker Win in One Night?” And if you recognize the image above from any of the nominated films in this category, then you know our answer is “at least two.” To be honest, I think this is more of a contest than some people would like to believe, and Baker’s amusing acceptance speech when receiving the screenplay award from the New York Film Critics Circle (listen to part of it here) explains why voters, though clearly in love with Anora,...
Oscar 2025 Winner Predictions: Director
Awards prognostication lives and dies on hypotheticals, and if it didn’t, it wouldn’t be worth putting much energy on it. Case in point: We now enter the part of our rolling awards coverage that we’re calling “How Many Oscars Will Sean Baker Win?” I’ve got no proof here, so you’ll have to take my word for it: Before the official start of the awards season, I saw best picture as Anora’s to lose, and that it was difficult to imagine anyone but Brady Corbet winning best director.
Oscar 2025 Winner Predictions: Documentary Feature
When asked last month by Variety about the anomaly of No Other Land still being without U.S. distribution, co-director Yuval Abraham could have pointed out who sits on, say, the board of directors for one of the most esteemed indie distribution companies.
Oscar 2025 Winner Predictions: Animated Feature
We got this one wrong last year, like many did, thinking that sentiment around The Boy and the Heron—namely, how it truly feels like a swan song for Miyazaki Hayao—wouldn’t be enough to tip the race in its favor. We figured that misgivings about Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse—which entered the race with Annie, PGA, and ACE trophies in hand—being a sequel were overblown or would be negated by, well, misgivings about The Boy and the Heron’s inscrutable wave of strangeness.
Oscar 2025 Winner Predictions: Documentary Short
You’ll find two of the finest films nominated for an Oscar this year in this category. One, “Incident,” which is stitched together from body-cam videos and other footage that captured the 2018 shooting of Harith Augustus in Chicago, is a less esoteric work than you might expect from director Bill Morrison, but it locates political resonances within that footage that make it as powerful as Dawson City: Frozen Time.
Oscar 2025 Winner Predictions: Costume Design
We have a great track record here, and that’s because we always remind ourselves that Oscar has a period fetish. But we’re going to break with tradition by not rallying behind first-time nominee Linda Muir’s moodily ostentatious garbs for Nosferatu, even though it’s the only period film in the category.
Oscar 2025 Winner Predictions: Supporting Actor
One of the very few pleasures of this year’s awards season has been Kieran Culkin taking the piss out of, well, the spectacle that is the awards season while still seeming flattered to have been invited to the party. That’s a tricky tightrope walk, and Culkin is a pro at it. Both in his roles and his life, he’s shown that he’s better than most at playing on the line between charisma and awkwardness. It’s certainly what makes his performances feel so human.
A Narratively Thin Morality Tale
Thordur Palsson’s The Damned coasts on the striking contrasts between the wintry landscapes of its 19th-century setting and the characters who trudge across them in clothes that appear as if they’ve been assembled from blankets or potato sacks.
The Criterion Collection
Louise Brooks’s famous bobbed hairstyle guaranteed her eternal inimitability, its razor-sharp aesthetic a marker of her essence. G.W. Pabst understood this, which is why when Brooks’s doomed flapper from Pandora’s Box flees a courtroom after a murder conviction, she cuts her hair to become almost unidentifiable—to be like other women, except perhaps for the curly-blond gal pal who longs for her affections.
Letters: Celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month with HCSO
The Harris County Sheriff’s Office proudly celebrates Hispanic Heritage Month, which takes place from September 15 to October 15. This month-long celebration acknowledges and honors Hispanic and Latino Americans’ heritage and significant contributions to our community and nation. Hispanic Heritage Month is a time to celebrate Hispanic communities’ diverse traditions and achievements. It provides an opportunity to appreciate the cultural richness that Hispanic Americans bring to our society.
An Empathetic Celebration of Community
One of the few indicators of where Amy Nicholson’s documentary Happy Campers takes place is a shot of wooden mile marker signs pointing mostly to cities in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. At another point, a woman discusses moving down from the Jersey shore to join her boyfriend at the coastal trailer park at the center of the film.
The Criterion Collection Original
Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall chaotically drops us into the chalet of Sandra (Sandra Hüller), Samuel (Samuel Theis), and their visually impaired young son, Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), in the French Alps. Sandra, a successful German writer, is in the midst of an interview with a visiting journalist (Camille Rutherford) that an unseen Samuel attempts to derail with his ceaseless blaring of an instrumental cover of 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.” from his upstairs office.
The Criterion Collection
From Sergei Eisenstein to Andrei Konchalovsky, Russian filmmakers perfected a formula for manufacturing social reality out of highly concentrated mixes of activist outrage and artistic chutzpah. Political hindsight overshadows their unparalleled toying with film language, but it also deepens great works of art like Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s Earth and Mikhail Kalatozov’s I Am Cuba.
A Guttersnipe's Wallow
Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire’s Asphalt City was originally titled Black Flies, after the Shannon Burke novel from which it’s adapted, when it premiered last year at Cannes. For a film about the difficult situations that E.M.T. workers have to deal with on New York City’s streets, Asphalt City has an appropriate directness. But it’s Black Flies that more accurately reflects the film’s lurid register.
The Criterion Collection
Alice Diop’s Saint Omer brings the French filmmaker into the realm of fiction for the first time, but preserves her documentary respect for the evidence of the audience’s eyes. A sober, pared-down courtroom drama, Saint Omer initially makes little effort to comment on its action, at times feeling more like presentation than representation.
'All the Beauty and the Bloodshed' Blu-ray Review
For director Laura Poitras, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed represents a departure of sorts. After centering films around people ranging from a former bodyguard for Osama bin Laden in The Oath to Edward Snowden in Citizenfour and Julian Assange in Risk, her latest documentary focuses on an artist: legendary photographer Nan Goldin.
Oscar Predictions 2024: What Will Win This Year
Normally this is the part where we take you on a brief temperature check on—if not philosophical flight of fancy over—the state of the movie industry and how that will factor into what’s occupying most of the real estate in Oscar voters’ heads. We usually delve into why in fact the whole annual spectacle serves just about anything but the purported task of rewarding the previous year’s best cinematic work. How does Parasite represent the best-case scenario for a more international AMPAS?
Suspected Murder-Suicide in Houston as Two Women Found Dead in
In a grim discovery within the confines of a northwest Houston apartment, two women were found dead in what law enforcement officials have characterized as a murder-suicide scenario, as per the Harris County Sheriff's Office. The residence, stationed at 11220 West Road within the Derby at Steeplechase Apartments, became the center of a tragic scene that investigators suggest had concealed the fatalities for several days before their eventual unearthing.
A Grating Wannabe Satire
You will probably laugh the first time Alejandro (Julio Torres) walks though the frame in Problemista, seemingly bouncing off the ground before gliding across it, almost as if he were walking on eggshells—or paintings of them.
'McCabe & Mrs. Miller' 4K UHD Blu-ray Review
There isn’t a conventional sound or image to be found in Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller, which exhilaratingly upends the audience’s senses, engaging one in a free-floating fashion that’s more in sync with the emotional effect of art with less intermediary filters than cinema, such as theater and live music.
The Criterion Collection
The enemy, as it seems it always has been, is within in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, but its violence, gore, and torrential mayhem is hard to miss. Influenced by the writings of Marshall McLuhan, this 1983 vision of the intermingling ideas and functions of technology, the mind, and “the flesh” is, like a great deal of Cronenberg’s work, endlessly fascinated with decay, bodily fluids, wounds, and growths.
The Criterion Collection
Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now is driven by a crushing sense of emotional desolation. The phrase “psychic thriller,” which was used to market the film, is technically true, but misleading, given that psychics are normally used by directors as springboards for action set pieces or as agents for ushering forth the explicit arrival of ghosts.
The Criterion Collection
In the 1960s, there were few cameramen who shared Nicolas Roeg’s ability to render sirenic, jittery sensuality at 24 frames per second—and this was an era whose dominant culture arguably cracked open and redefined the sensual palate.
Warner Home Video
God, or at least the idea of a god, is an omniscient presence that’s also suspiciously absent in William Friedkin’s The Exorcist. The faith is kept alive in the film’s perpetual use of religious iconography, implying a worldly sense of spiritual belief, but the way in which the various priests conduct their pietism, most exemplified by Jason Miller’s brooding church psychologist Damien Karras, practically render their convictions as moot.
The Complete First Season' 4K UHD Review
The resemblance of Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us to a prestige TV or film drama has been the object of both praise and derision since its release in 2013. The game’s prioritization of its characters’ antiheroic arcs—rendered through meticulously staged motion capture—along with its episodic structure and on-rails story progression, made it possible to either laud its narrative ambition or accuse it of aspiring to be something more than a game.
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