Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! brashly announces in its opening title card that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein on a dare, and that’s an ethos the film itself has…
With miscarriage after miscarriage of justice, the United States has all but exposed the amorality at the heart of its empire: first the Epstein files…
We need to talk about Tommy. In Jan Komasa’s Heel, Tommy (Anson Boon) is a proper hooligan. His nights out mean rails of cocaine in…
Jim Jarmusch’s characters tend to not be long for their worlds. William Blake, Johnny Depp’s meek and self-effacing protagonist of Dead Man, loses out on…
Hoppers, the latest animation project from Pixar/Disney, exceeds according to at least one important metric: it’s a familiar product, offering easily consumable family-fare and realizing…
For the most part, the documentaries that have made Gianfranco Rosi’s reputation have a firm basis in geography. Sacro GRA (2013) explored life in Rome…
It’s been a long and winding to get Psycho Killer to the big screen. The film is the brainchild of screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker, who…
After nearly half a decade of putting out two movies per year, Hong Sang-soo has slowed from a full-on sprint to a jogger’s pace, releasing…
Richard Fleischer’s 1952 thriller The Narrow Margin is a tough, taut little gem, a masterclass in narrative economy and tight, claustrophobic mise-en-scène. Clocking in at barely…
Ever since Terrence Malick pretty much pulled it off with The Tree of Life, every few years another auteur — usually in the sci-fi idiom…
An old army colleague of mine, Colonel Cosgrove, wept today. He wept at a world so crude and bleak. “Could it be,” his red eyes…
I’d promised myself to buy one book by a French author when perusing the tourist-heavy English language-friendly bookstores in Paris, and, while of course I…
You might not know Nick Corirossi, but if you’ve spent enough time in alt-comedy circles, you may have heard of his alter-ego. “Bug Mane” is…
“What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and…
The Bluff isn’t the same kind of pirate film as Pirates of the Caribbean. Unlike the leviathan Disney franchise, The Bluff has very little seafaring,…
Allow this writer to save you some time: Baz Luhrmann’s EPiC, a concert film made in the wake of the eponymous director’s newfound (and lucrative)…
Content warning: this piece mentions Imperial Japan’s sexual violence. In Yasuzo Masumura’s Black Test Car (1962), the director revisits ideas from his earlier Giants and…
Bebe Go’s 11 starts with a concession: “in february 2020, i received a grant to make a feature film,” reads its lime-green title cards. “the…
One day there will be a knock on the door and it’ll be me. …
Occasionally something enters the streaming/DTV action space that genuinely merits curiosity, even when the project doesn’t quite live up to its potential. Marking a perfect…
Beware the multi-hyphenate. Though there are plenty of examples of cross-disciplinary artists who are successful in more than one realm, it’s worth treating the feature…