Author: Josef Rodriguez

Josef Rodriguez has published 47 articles.



News

The 2022 Sundance Film Festival, which ran from January 20 to January 30, was the second in a row to adapt to COVID-19 protocols by showcasing an entirely digital lineup. Following a surge of cases caused by the omicron variant, festival-goers were disappointed to learn that Sundance would, once more, [...]

News

Men are monsters and monsters are men. Through the course of human history, according to Guillermo del Toro, this is the law of the land, the only principle in an unprincipled world. Since his 1993 debut, “Cronos,” a film that considered notions of eternity by turning grandpa into a bloodsucking [...]

News

In a sweeping rejection of Pinochetism, the people of Chile chose liberal candidate Gabriel Boric over his far-right opponent José Antonio Kast in the country’s hotly contested December 19th runoff election. Boric, who took 56% of the popular vote, rose to prominence as a representative of student activists during protests [...]

News

There was never any doubt that Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story” would be a good movie. When it was first reported that Spielberg would be collaborating with Stephen Sondheim and Tony Kushner to remake the most influential musical movie of all time, its brilliance felt more like an impending inevitability. [...]

Culture

This profile is based on an interview between Gloria Calderón Kellett and Alissa Lopez Serfozo. For someone who just signed an eight-figure deal with Amazon Studios, Gloria Calderón Kellett seems mostly unfazed. More concerned with impressing her parents than anybody in a boardroom, the compulsively busy multi-hyphenate, whose latest original [...]

Culture

Vast colonies of monarch butterflies have made their home in Michoacan, Mexico, as they have in various parts of Canada, California, and Texas. Unbound by borders, the monarchs float through the air, blissfully oblivious to the perils of the grounded, mortal world. At least, that’s how it should be. Like [...]

Culture

Peruvian Filmmaker Claudia Llosa’s “Fever Dream” wastes no time delivering on the promises of its title. Its opening moments are a barrage of disorienting imagery and unbodied narration as Llosa offers answers to questions that haven’t been asked yet. Amanda (María Valverde) is being dragged through the forest; by who, [...]

News

Ridley Scott, now an elder statesman of genre filmmaking, is motivated only by what moves him. “I’m a moviemaker, not a documentarian,” he once said, and nothing is a greater testament to that philosophy than Scott’s own body of work. Endlessly fascinated by the human experience while comfortably removed from [...]

Culture

Back when Blumhouse Productions was the Little Indie Horror Studio That Could, their recipe for success was simple: release low-budget films that connect with audiences and consistently rake in absurd sums of money. But the siren song of big streamers like Hulu and Amazon has Blumhouse’s recent output feeling more [...]

News

The line separating Tom Hanks’ on- and off-screen personas has always been a little murky. That inimitable ability to split the difference between working-class Americana and American exceptionalism has long cemented Hanks as a national treasure. His behind-the-scenes work has also afforded him much of the same reputation–wherever an “important” [...]