Nearly everything and everybody is disgusting in Fatih Akin’s The Golden Glove. That is, besides an attractive blonde high schooler whom serial killer/rapist Fritz Honka (Jonas Dassler) lusts after. In a typical slasher film, this girl would represent our POV, with Fritz being some terrifying…
Paolo Sorrentino’s Loro is art in the Age of Trump — so basically the most weak-sauce imaginable critique of a buffoonish caricature (former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi instead) meant as comfort food for liberal audiences. There’s plenty of low-hanging fruit to gawk at here, from…
The corrupt progress of global capitalism is and has been an inevitability for the past half century, its footprint visible in the bruises mottling the surface of society and making vulnerable all but the ultra-monied elite. The Laundromat takes aim at this reality and…
Lifting a page from a varied litany of genre precedents, Jovanka Vuckovic’s Riot Girls envisions a post-apocalyptic world — brought about via virus, not zombies or nuclear war — where adults have died off and only kids remain. In a choice that’s meant to…
Takashi Miike has never been one to play it safe. With over 100 films under his belt in a little over 28 years, you would think the writer-director had exhausted all possible scenarios in which he could showcase his singular tastes and proclivities. And…
Writer-director Michael Tyburski’s feature film debut, The Sound of Silence, certainly has an intriguing premise, based on what’s known as house tuning — the process of calibrating the sounds in one’s home to relieve stress, anxiety, or depression. (At the very least, it compelled…
Diego Maradona, Asif Kapadia’s latest film, is entirely comprised of archival footage, most of which comes from Italian news sources that preyed upon the famed Napoli soccer player. Focusing solely on his years in Naples — which he came to through one of the…
Precise figures will vary, but the fact remains that our world is in the midst of the largest refugee crisis since WWII. The convergence of drought, civil strife, and poverty — all linked to global warming and disaster capitalism, as carefully delineated by Naomi…
For those who haven’t yet written off James Franco’s entire career, there’s some cause for optimism in the first act of Zeroville, his much delayed adaptation of the supposedly unfilmable novel by Steve Erickson. Oddly enough, it starts around the same time of the…
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 some DVD bargain bin assuming that those still exist by the time this sentence finishes. In other words, while the title of In Review…
