Relative to other prestigious annual film festivals, NYFF typically operates — like due to its situation within the calendar year — as more of a curative experience than earlier events, collecting together the best of the year’s festival circuit according to its programming team. NYFF also, of course, pairs this assemblage with a handful of high-profile premieres, and voila. 2021’s edition falls very much in line with this familiar strategy, with highlights from Berlin, Cannes, Venice, and elsewhere populating the…
The French Dispatch is the latest Wes Anderson film to be utterly encumbered by the director’s propeller-beanie twee and flattened storytelling chops. For better or for worse, there are few working American auteurs whose visual…
Louis Wain has one distinctly lovely stretch, but it’s shrouded in pervasive busyness and zaniness that ultimately sinks the whole enterprise. Will Sharpe’s The Electrical Life of Louis Wain opens with Benedict Cumberbatch, heavily pancaked in old-age…
Lucky Chan-sil is a delicate, deeply humanist film superbly anchored by Kang’s lead performance. “If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life,” the saying goes. Tell that to Lee…
Halloween Kills is a smug bit of a ill-advised fan service with dull kills, sanctimonious plot beats, and little narrative progression. David Gordon Green’s 2018 take on John Carpenter’s seminal horror classic Halloween was not…
Broadcast Signal Intrusion is built on used parts, but Gentry executes his vision with queasy dread and necessary ambiguity. Working late nights transferring tapes of old broadcasts to disc, James comes across a strange pirate…
André De Toth is one of the great, unsung directors of Hollywood’s Golden Age. As Fred Camper noted in a 1997 essay bemoaning his lack of stature, De Toth receives only a cursory nod…
The Last Duel is another win for Scott, an agreeably brutal, wickedly incisive tale that is considerably more substantive than mere Rashomon comps. Blending his lavish but gritty historical epics like Gladiator or Kingdom of Heaven…
- Album Roundup by InRO Staff Music
Album Roundup — August 2021 | Part 3: Kanye West, Big Red Machine, Deafheaven
Kanye West The announcement of a new Kanye West album — his tenth in fact — brought with it the delighted attention of the usual, dusty music-minded media institutions, desperate to hitch themselves to…
Parallel Mothers If Pedro Almodóvar’s pandemic short The Human Voice hinted at a freshly energized director liberated from the burden of expectations, then his latest feature crystallizes this as fact. His first feature since…
The Velvet Underground proves an interesting resting place for a litany of period detritus, but stumbles when foregrounding its titular subjects. Todd Haynes, a noted semiotician, tends to reconstruct rather than document, reincorporating tokens of…
