Nathaniel E. Bell

1 month ago | villagevoice.com | Nathaniel E. Bell |R.C. Baker |Shana Nys Dambrot |T.J. English

Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia is a well-chilled thriller in the Gallic style. Its closest cousins include Dominik Moll’s With a Friend Like Harry (2000), Cedric Kahn’s Red Lights (2004), and any number of the late Claude Chabrol’s autumnal work. It’s the kind of film that makes you lean in and ask, “What kind of movie is this?” — until the very last frame, and even then, it plays the story close to the vest.

Jan 10, 2025 | villagevoice.com | Nathaniel E. Bell |R.C. Baker

After two period dramas in a row, English director Mike Leigh returns to his favorite milieu, present-day London, for Hard Truths, another vividly etched character piece guaranteed to produce laughs and winces in equal measure. The center of attention is Pansy, a middle-aged, middle-class agoraphobe and clean freak caught in a state of perpetual agitation.

Nov 8, 2024 | villagevoice.com | Nathaniel E. Bell |R.C. Baker

Giant bug movies have been a sci-fi mainstay since the 1950s (ants in 1954’s Them, a spider in 1955’s Tarantula), when a paranoid public projected its nuclear anxiety onto a variety of insects, arachnids, and other fearsome arthropods. The objects of anxiety in Elevation, the new post-apocalyptic thriller starring Anthony Mackie, are roughly the size of an SUV, come out of the ground like cicadas, and look vaguely like armored beetles.

Sep 20, 2023 | villagevoice.com | Nathaniel E. Bell |R.C. Baker |Michael Atkinson |Ruthie Kornblatt-Stier

For his third outing as Hercule Poirot, Kenneth Branagh, together with screenwriter Michael Green, made the shrewd decision to select one of Agatha Christie's least read and most tepidly reviewed later novels for adaptation. Almost nobody going into A Haunting in Venice will know ahead of time whodunit. But whether they will care whodunit is another matter.

Jun 28, 2023 | villagevoice.com | Nathaniel E. Bell

Padre Pio was, by all accounts, a remarkable man. Born in 1887, he lived to be 81, serving for many decades as a Franciscan friar before being canonized by the Catholic Church in 2002. He was an authentic mystic who claimed to have had divine visions of angels and demons, was marked by stigmata on his hands and feet, and even purportedly got into fistfights with the Devil himself.