The final act of Matt Johnson’s 2023 comedy Blackberry — one of the best films of its year, and this half decade — opens with…
“Look at its body,” Melanie Griffith commands with a bawdy dip in vocal tone. The ‘80s icon, star of capitalist fable Working Girl and voyeuristic…
The increasingly familiar annual Chinese New Year release slate tends now to arrive with two separate guarantees: the first, assured box office success; and the…
In Kevin and Matthew McManus’ Redux Redux, Irene Kelly (Michaela McManus) vaults through an endless sequence of parallel realities, searching for a universe where her…
“Amanda Kramer Body Swap Movie” is a description that, if you’re familiar with her work, should get that brain firing with possibility. At the very…
It’s no secret that adapting video games into movies has a shockingly low success rate; adapting any medium to another has its own unique difficulties,…
Where is the line between genuine love and selfish devotion? That’s the question bubbling at the center of Dusty Mancinelli and Madeleine Sims-Fewer’s sophomore feature,…
It’s been a while since we last saw Gore Verbinski. Definitely an idiosyncratic stylist, he found himself a real niche in the early 2000s with…
School board elections, in the best of times, are non-ideological affairs, with local communities electing representatives to prioritize the effective administration and financial management of…
Luis Buñuel didn’t think much of the Joseph Kessel novel that was the source material for his 1967 adaptation of Belle de Jour and mostly…
In “Wuthering Heights” — as Emerald Fennell sees it — death and ecstasy rest on the head of the same pin. Its opening credits are…
A severely schematic crime thriller that paints a rather stereotypical picture of the Brazilian underworld but is chiefly about how many long, unbroken, and overhead…
The title of Bart Layton’s Crime 101 is a play on the film’s plot primarily transpiring on and around the 101 Freeway — a major interstate highway…
Filmmaking duo Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli took the 2020 TIFF Midnight Madness crowd by storm with their stunning debut feature Violation, an extremely dark,…
In 2021, a residential area in the southside of Glasgow, Scotland, exploded into an impromptu stand-off against police and deportation officers. Early on May 13,…
If one were to conjure an impression of the apocalypse, it might be in the heart of sound — a detonation so vast and infinite…
Krakatoa If one were to conjure an impression of the apocalypse, it might be in the heart of sound — a detonation so vast and…
Ashish Avikunthak’s films, like many Asian and African avant-garde films, unfortunately find themselves caught in a tangle of categorization problems when playing in Western festivals.…
It’s a classic conundrum: a documentary focuses on advocacy on a very important topic, and manages to some extent to communicate meaningful information about that…
Since 2018’s Mirai enjoyed substantial international acclaim, and was nominated for an Academy Award, Mamoru Hosoda seems to be on a bit of a Western…
The 20th century is insistently knocking at our door. The crises of its institutions dominate the news, its tragedies repeating themselves daily as farce. The…