Zombi Child
Nearly two decades after his first feature, Bertrand Bonello is by now well-known for a certain style of haunting unpredictability, in which marginalized characters are caught up in sweeping societal...
View ArticleHoly Hell! Best in Show Turns 20
Dog people can make an easy target for cringe comedy, and yet Christopher Guest’s mockumentaries routinely use niche passions to draw together a diverse group of offbeat characters, rather than...
View ArticleThe Gentlemen
After multiple, inconsistent excursions into the world of tentpole filmmaking, director Guy Ritchie is back to doing what he does best: sharp and stylish gangster pictures populated with sprawling...
View ArticleOeuvre: Tarkovsky: Solaris
More than anything else, Andrei Tarkovsky is a director of the ineffable, creating works suffused with a sprawling sense of wonder, the outcomes of which always result in more questions than answers. A...
View ArticleColor Out of Space
Marrying old school tension with fresh and fun technology, Richard Stanley’s Color Out of Space is a blast. While the gothic-manor-in-the-deep-woods setting will be familiar, what takes place there is...
View ArticleJohn Henry
For a film named after an iconic folk hero, John Henry is both uninspired and uninspiring, a mixed bag and missed opportunity that’s as confounding as it is infuriating. Director Will Forbes seems...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Revisit: All About My Mother
With All About My Mother, Pedro Almodóvar entered his Old Master phase, catapulting himself definitively onto the world stage and proving that he was more than just a Spanish national treasure – this...
View ArticleBeanpole
With both its talented stars making their film debut, and director Kantemir Balagov not yet 30, Beanpole is bursting with young talent. Yet these emerging artists demonstrate an impressive patience...
View ArticleOscar-Nominated Live Action Shorts
This year’s slate of Best Short (Live Action) Oscar-nominated films are each a rumination on familial connection and what such a primeval part of the human experience means in these globalized times....
View ArticleOeuvre: Tarkovsky: Mirror
With its surreal visions and hypnotic rejection of narrative flow, Solaris had announced the true arrival of Andrei Tarkovsky’s singular form, finding abstract, intuitive expression of the spiritual...
View ArticleThe Rhythm Section
Rife with femme fatale and revenge-story tropes, The Rhythm Section suffers from woefully uneven pacing that often groans along when it should hum. Director Reed Morano cut her teeth as a...
View ArticleMiss Americana
Of course it begins with a kitten. Miss Americana, the manufactured yet still revealing new documentary about superstar Taylor Swift, starts with the multiplatinum seller sitting at the piano as a...
View Article2020 Oscar-Nominated Animated Shorts
The five nominees for Oscars in the Short Film (Animated) category share many similarities, besides one outlier film that is unrelated to the other nominees. Chief among these similarities is the theme...
View ArticleRevisit: In Bruges
In Bruges wastes no time, opening with a clinical narration: “After I’d killed him, I dropped the gun in the Thames, washed the residue off my hands in the bathroom of a Burger King, and walked home to...
View ArticleJosé
With José, director Li Cheng offers a meditation on the mutual oppressions of religion and poverty on any sense of freedom. Set in present day Guatemala City, the film follows José (Enrique Salanic), a...
View ArticleStreaming Hell: Tam Cam: The Untold Story
While not quite a fair standard of comparison, I now find it impossible not to judge fantasy action spectaculars against the high standard set by Baahubali, S.S. Rajamouli’s as-yet-peerless South...
View ArticleIncitement
Yaron Zilberman’s Incitement begins with the words of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin announcing the 1993 Oslo Accords, posing with Bill Clinton and PLO head Yasser Arafat as he talks about the...
View ArticleOeuvre: Tarkovsky: Stalker
Today, the title of Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film makes it sound like at best a midnight movie about a crazed hitchhiker hunting teens. But, like everything Tarkovsky touches, the title came about in a...
View ArticleBirds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)
DC’s movies feel like they’re constantly undergoing some kind of brand identity crisis compared to the smoothed over aesthetics of Disney’s Marvel machine, which can result in some embarrassing lows,...
View ArticleThe Lodge
Audiences have had to wait six years for aunt/nephew team Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala to follow up their breakout film, 2014’s Austrian horrorGoodnight Mommy, and the wait was worth it. The...
View Article