As February comes to a close, we’re back with more new reviews of this month’s latest releases. We’re not exactly moving through the year’s prime release real estate, but there are nevertheless a handful of big studio projects generating plenty of divisive discourse — The Monkey, Captain America: Brave New World, Paddington in Peru, etc. — as well as some, in truth, more appealing low-budget, low-visibility titles, including Rats!, Jazzy, and The Fishing Place. In case you haven’t been keeping up, you’ll also find all our February feature pieces collected at the bottom of this post, where you can catch up on our latest festival coverage (IFFR, Slamdance), as well as the newest entries in our Kicking the Canon series (Million Dollar Baby, Nashville, Where the Sidewalk Ends, and The Long Gray Line. And don’t miss some excellent essays, plus an interview with Matthew Rankin and Ila Firouzabadi where they talk Universal Language. That’s all for this month — happy reading!
Million Dollar Baby might open abruptly onto a brightly lit boxing ring, with two men contained in its boundaries and loudly grunting as they vigorously throw their fists at each other, but it’s less a film about the sport of boxing, or the violence contained within the square, or even…
In the Mouth In the Mouth, the sophomore feature from Cory Santilli (Saul at Night, 2019) is everything from a film noir to a prison escape thriller to a surreal buddy comedy to a sentimental drama. It follows the hermetic Merl (Colin Burgess), a young man who refuses to go…
Watching Fabrice-Ange Zaphiratos’ Blood Beat in 2025 is a wild sensory experience. It has the (ahem) beats of a slasher while boasting atmospheric sound design, expressionistic editing, and an all-around weird plotline. Ted, a college-aged man, and his girlfriend, Sarah, decide to spend Christmas with his family on their rural…
“24 of your favorite stars in Nashville!” hollers the voiceover in the opening credits of Robert Altman’s consensus favorite and magnum opus. (We can ignore the fact that only 23 of the cast members acted consistently, and several members of the ensemble likely have less screen time than Elliott Gould…
Universal Language is, at its core, a community portrait. Matthew Rankin’s second feature was co-written and imagined by friends and collaborators Pirouz Namati and Ila Firouzabadi, with all three of them appearing in the film alongside people they know and love. Their film charts the clashes and convergences between a…
Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950) would be Otto Preminger’s last film for 20th Century Fox, capping off a productive (if tumultuous) chapter in the director’s career. It’s a twisty, morally ambiguous crime picture, so much so that the screenplay (credited to the great Ben Hecht) underwent numerous rounds of revisions…
Why do we even watch this movie in the first place? This is one of those scary movies, isn’t it? For years we hear about it, then one day realize we’re actually allowed to watch it. So we put it on. Oh, it’s Godard. We know what to expect. He’s…
The year before he starred in Witness — Peter Weir’s acclaimed drama about a cop sent to protect a young Amish boy who witnesses a murder in a train station bathroom (a traumatic first journey out of his hermetic vicinage) that became the eighth-highest grossing film of 1985 and earned…
Pavements “The world’s most important and influential band breaks up and it’s not a big deal.” Thus begins Alex Ross Perry’s Pavements, establishing from the jump the veins of both puckishness and earnestness that will run through this atypical, asymmetrical portrait of early-’90s indie rock wunderkinds Pavement. And on both…
Blazing Fists I watched two films from IFFR’s 2025 festival: one was The Last Dance, the smash hit Hong Kong family melodrama set in the world of funerals, and the other was Blazing Fists, Takashi Miike’s kickboxing movie. The surprise, then, is that only one of them made me tear…
When 20th Century Fox bought the rights for a new anamorphic lens technology in 1952, whose origins dated back to a 1926 process called Anamorphoscope, it did so in the midst of an industrial existential crisis. Television’s rapid ubiquity and the tepid success of other widescreen shooting and projection processes…
Yasuko, Songs of Days Past Like many Japanese directors his age, Kichitaro Negishi got his start at the legendary Nikkatsu studio making the only thing the studio found to be profitable in the late ‘70s: the Roman porno genre. His young compatriots at the company saw artistic opportunity in the…
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