Director Mark Jenkin’s Bait is a fascinating curiosity. As a drama, it’s fairly basic, but also mostly effective: Martin & Steven Ward (Edward Rowe…
Belonging opens with a voice-over delivering an admission of guilt, one coldly articulated by Onur (Çaglar Yalçinkaya), as he hastily divulges the details surrounding…
The 48th edition of New Directors/New Films runs March 27th – April 7th. For our first of two dispatches, we tackle the second feature from Canadian…
Modestly assembled and expertly executed, David Wenham’s delightful debut feature Ellipsis conjures those occasions when human connection comes calling, often in spite of some general apathy. Employing…
Ash Is Purest White begins with the blaring of a bus horn — a sound which bears striking resemblance to another, heard at the…
From their first release (1982’s Garlands), Cocteau Twins enjoyed critical acclaim. But it was only after the departure of founding member and bassist Will Heggie — and the…
Iranian writer/director Asghar Farhadi understands the nature of secrets and their revelations, that they rarely signal resolution and instead work to further complicate situations.…
Early in the second half of J.C. Chandor’s Triple Frontier, Ben Affleck’s character executes a South American cocaine farmer, lying on the ground, just…
A young man heads to Singapore in search of his mother’s family after his father, a successful ramen chef, dies. Gauzy flashbacks fill in his…
Us begins with a sincerely spooky prologue taking place in 1986, when young Addy wanders away from her bickering parents at the Santa Cruz boardwalk…
Maren Morris’ second album, Girl, certainly feels and sounds like her type of record, at least based off of the music from her previous…
“College rock” has lost just about any use it once had as a genre signifier, now mostly just a descriptor for broad, alternative rock…
Stanley Kubrick’s final film is one of the least-sexy films ever made about sex. Libidinous, yes, and full of naked bodies in salacious motion,…
As with 2010’s exceptional October Country, Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher’s The Gospel of Eureka brings an intelligent, discerning empathy to matters of political,…
Birds of Passage, Ciro Guerra and Cristina Gallego’s latest collaborative effort (previously a producer, Gallego serves as co-director here) finds the duo continuing their…
There’s a fine line between the absurd and the transcendent, and Tim Sutton’s Donnybrook crosses it with ludicrous abandon. Jarhead Earl (Jamie Bell) is…
OK, so things don’t really vanish anymore: even the most limited film release will (most likely, eventually) find its way onto some streaming service or into…
To distinguish between “old-school” hip-hop of the late 1970s and the “new school,” founded primarily by Run-DMC and LL Cool J, listen to Kurtis…