Ever since Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson entered the franchise with Fast Five, the Fast & Furious films have increasingly distanced themselves from their now-quaint LA street-racing roots, becoming instead gigantic international caper films that have the characters shooting missiles at submarines from muscle cars.…
James Longley’s Angels Are Made of Light is an essential document, chronicling several seasons at the Daqiqi Balkhi School in Kabul, Afghanistan. The remnants of conflict are everywhere, even as life goes on in and around this war-torn landscape. Longley chronicles the school, which as the…
Abel (Louis Garrel) has a dilemma, one that makes-up the entire emotional framework of A Faithful Man. Abel lusts after two equally beautiful (and deviously cunning) women — his former girlfriend, Marianne (Laetitia Casta), who left him six years earlier for another man, and…
It can be difficult to wrap ones head around what ‘Mumblecore’ is today: a genuine movement ten-plus years ago, and one that once had so much promise, it’s finally yielded to some of its shallower tendencies. Lynn Shelton’s latest feature, Sword of Trust, is a…
Writer-director Guy Nattiv’s Skin isn’t just a feature-length extension of Nattiv’s Oscar-winning short film, also called Skin; the 2018 short played out like the most socially-conscious episode of The Twilight Zone anyone could imagine, as a backwoods racist received a taste of his own…
We may have gotten to the point where not only is A24 curating its brand with obvious aesthetic guidelines, but also, we have fresh filmmakers out there recognizing those guidelines, and choosing to craft films with the A24 demographics in mind — much like…
Radu Jude begins his magisterial I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians with actress Ioana Iacob introducing herself to the audience, announcing the name of her character within the film, and then bidding us a cheerful “I hope you…
In its attempts to chart the decaying values of a country in the midst of political turmoil, Benjamín Naishtat’s Rojo is disruptive from the very outset. The Argentinian writer-director’s exploration of poisonous nobility in 1970s high society finds Claudio (Dario Grandinetti), a Buenos Aires…
An arch and wickedly funny portrait of American male masculinity in the 21st century, one could argue that writer-director Riley Stearns’s The Art of Self-Defense is the kind of film we desperately need in this day and age of toxicity. In telling the story of…
Following in the footsteps of Cindy Sherman, Julian Schnabel, and Steve McQueen, amongst others, Birmingham-born artist Richard Billingham makes the jump from the gallery to feature films with Ray & Liz. But the fact that Billingham is a photographer known for portraiture is key to what doesn’t…
