Uncropped In her 1977 essay collection On Photography, Susan Sontag argued that the abundance of photographic images in our culture had begun to engender…
Symbols are like Alfred Hitchcock’s (flawed) definition of drama — “life with the dull bits cut out.” Their universal appeal derives from prioritizing a…
To view history through the lens of the present frequently engenders all kinds of catharsis, from the moral smugness of the studio biopic to…
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…
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…
Ridley Scott is 85 years old and has directed, among other things, four feature films in the last five years, one of which was…
The art of adaptation precludes mere transcription, most particularly where the written word is translated to a visual medium like film. Nowhere is the…
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…
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…
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…
The legacy of a venerated musician comprises the myriad testimonies in They Shot the Piano Player. Colleagues and family of Francisco Tenório Júnior share…
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…
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…
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…
What sets Eli Roth apart from other contemporary American horror directors is his unique braiding of current issues with high genre literacy. This holds…
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…
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…
Consider the fortunes of Taika Waititi in just the last five years. Briefly heralded as one of the more exciting voices in pop filmmaking…