Cliff Walkers is a visually slick and violent spy flick that avoids propaganda and imbues its proceedings with considerable emotional and existential weight. Don’t let a release date timed to Laodong Jie (Chinese Labor Day)…

Monster is a messy, crude, and politically flaccid throwaway flick that probably should have just stayed on the shelf. Premiering at Sundance in 2018 to no real buzz, Anthony Mandler’s Monster proceeded to sit on…

The Water Man is a slight film that gets bogged down under the weight of its heavy themes and nondescript myth-making. Let’s just be blunt for a moment: if The Water Man weren’t the…

Fried Barry‘s shock tactics wear thin after a while and its stylistic cribbing leaves much to be desired, but it possesses enough ferocity and ambition to keep director Kruger in mind going forward. The…

Much like the man at its center, State Funeral is an inscrutable, complex work. Josef Stalin died on March 5th, 1953, at his Kuntsevo dacha, following a cerebral hemorrhage and a few days of…

El Planeta This year, New Directors/New Films opens with Amalia Ulman’s debut feature film El Planeta, a cool choice for MoMA and Film at Lincoln Center, two institutions that generally shy away from any…

A chandelier swings in the gloom, tremulous strings kick in and tension mounts as the camera pulls in. The glinting fixture rocks back and forth through the inky blackness. It is untethered, its branching…

Mainstream is a depthless, toothless attempt at satire that was out-of-touch at conception and arrives well past its expiration date. Social media, as captured in cinema, is largely a trap. The past decade has…

Once seen as a tragic fall from grace, today it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to hear someone sing the praises of the movies Francis Ford Coppola made in the 1980s. Starting…

While The Mitchells vs. the Machines doesn’t live up to obvious touchstone The Incredibles, it rides its own humorous and referential wavelength to mild success. While less an homage to superhuman wisdom and superheroic strength…