Articles by Travis Mackenzie Hoover

Hunger

Steve McQueen

PUBLISHED Apr 9, 2009

A certain dead actor has not come out of retirement — the Steve McQueen at the helm of Hunger is a respected visual artist making his...

Gomorrah

Matteo Garone

PUBLISHED Mar 12, 2009

The big cheat of most mafia movies is that they purport to represent a terrible social trap while glorifying it at the same time. Gomorrah...

Wendy and Lucy

Kelly Reichardt

PUBLISHED Feb 5, 2009

Kelly Reichardt is one of the last American directors to be at all credible. While her more high-profile contemporaries are obsessed with o...

The Geisha

Hideo Gosha

PUBLISHED Feb 4, 2009

The turnaround from '70s grunge to '80s wealth hit Japan as it did everywhere else, hence we find samurai outlaw Hideo Gosha about-facing w...

A Hero Ain't Nothin' But a Sandwich

Ralph Nelson

PUBLISHED Feb 4, 2009

Would that this 1978 film had a stronger director. Adapting Alice Childress's famous novel requires a stronger hand and a deeper understand...

Father of the Kamikaze

Kosaku Yamashita

PUBLISHED Jan 25, 2009

This 1974 Japanese historical thriller is pretty much par for the course: lots of speeches, lots of angst, lots of disappointment, lots of...

Un Conte de Noel

Arnaud Desplechin

PUBLISHED Nov 27, 2008

This is a movie that goes so very right that it constantly reminds you of how it could have gone so completely wrong. Loosely fit into the...

ReGenesis: Season One

PUBLISHED Nov 21, 2008

I’ve been tedious in my CanCon smack downs before, so let me take it down a notch: ReGenesis isn’t the worst show ever made, just the last...