To view history through the lens of the present frequently engenders all kinds of catharsis, from the moral smugness of the studio biopic to the…
There’s no denying the contemporary trend to “narrativize” otherwise fact-based documentaries, filmmakers shaping reams of footage into something resembling the three-act structure of the average…
For most of Frederick Wiseman’s career, the master documentarian has focused on the lives and institutions of the United States. His films have painted a…
Ridley Scott is 85 years old and has directed, among other things, four feature films in the last five years, one of which was heavily…
The art of adaptation precludes mere transcription, most particularly where the written word is translated to a visual medium like film. Nowhere is the canvas…
The camera’s all-encompassing eye, famously termed the “kino-eye” by Russian filmmaker and theorist Dziga Vertov, has always been capable of revealing the mysterious and hidden.…
With his latest film Monster, Hirokazu Kore-eda has outdone himself. Rather than make one bad film, as he usually does, the Japanese director has made…
When the 2018 remake of old Hollywood standby A Star is Born dropped, it marked the culmination of over a decade’s worth of effort to…
The legacy of a venerated musician comprises the myriad testimonies in They Shot the Piano Player. Colleagues and family of Francisco Tenório Júnior share personal…
One of the most discussed Estonian films of the year, Dark Paradise is a strange beast from one of the country’s most promising and rising…
It’s always frustrating when the awesome beauty of manicured, ornate spectacle gets caught in a quagmire of its own ideological reduction. When aesthetics, so carefully…
As a television actor whose first directorial effort, a spiky genre mash-up that nebulously spoke to the zeitgeist, won an Academy Award for their screenwriting,…
What sets Eli Roth apart from other contemporary American horror directors is his unique braiding of current issues with high genre literacy. This holds true…
Once again, we’ve arrived at that most wonderful time of the year. Which means, as all around we begin to see candy canes, silver lanes,…
Coincidentally or not, Sarvnik Kaur’s new documentary Against the Tide arrives just one year after Shaunak Sen’s acclaimed 2022 doc All That Breathes. The two…
Consider the fortunes of Taika Waititi in just the last five years. Briefly heralded as one of the more exciting voices in pop filmmaking —…
Between the birth of the civil rights movement and the present dearth of ideological nuance, no small credit should be given to the former for…
A police investigation into the attempted murder of a fictional city’s vice mayor (Zhang Guoli), led by his percipient yet underachieving policeman son (Lei Jiayin),…
Songs of Earth On November 14, 2023, this year, the United States federal government released the National Climate Assessment, the latest report comprehensively spelling out…
Free Solo, Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi’s 2018 documentary, was a visually stunning document of a truly impressive feat: Alex Honnold climbing the entirety…
When critic Darren Hughes and filmmaker Paul Harrill founded The Public Cinema in 2015, their goal was to bring important works of world cinema and…