In Xavier Legrand’s Custody, viewers may get the sense that instead of the domestic drama this has been billed as, what they’re in fact watching is something much closer…
In transmuting the true-life story of rodeo star Brady Jandreau into the sort-of-fictionalized The Rider, director Chloé Zhao uses low-key character and narrative detail to…
Above all else, Andrew Haigh has proven himself a deeply empathic artist; whether tackling 21st century queer identity (Looking, Weekend) or the devolution of a decades-long relationship…
Scott Cooper is not a subtle filmmaker. Further proof of this comes in the first five minutes of his Hostiles, when two young children and…
Downsizing represents a departure from a filmography built on incisive character studies and black comedy; Alexander Payne imbues his latest with a broader tonal register,…
Guillermo del Toro abandons his recent efforts at delivering alt-blockbusters and curating photography for interior design catalogs with The Shape of Water. A mute-mermaid romance…
Tackling the trickiest of transpositions, that of adapting a dialogue-driven one-act play to the big screen, Benedict Andrews’s Una takes on David Harrower’s Blackbird—and it mostly…
As a documentary film student newly arrived in America, director Nanfu Wang’s probing I Am Another You begins as she meets a charismatic, intentionally homeless 22-year-old…
Mademoiselle Paradis tells the true story of the titular musical prodigy, an Austrian contemporary of Mozart, during a most strange period of her life. Blind…
John Trengove’s The Wound is a thematically blunt but visually dynamic film, one built around intimate, observational camerawork and an integrity of character development. Impressively choreographing a delicate…
Deeply atmospheric and tonally akin to a variety of nefarious pseudo-procedural Asian imports of the past two decades (The Cure, Memories of Murder, The Wailing),…
The high-stakes world of standardized testing may sound like a punchline, but that’s essentially the setup to Nattawut Poonpiriya’s NYAFF-opening Bad Genius. The film follows Lynn (Chutimon…
#8: It Comes at Night Download episode here. Listen to episode here. Episode Description: On this week’s episode we head to the movie theater and check…
In her promising first feature, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Iranian director Ana Lily Amirpour forewent the feminist messaging her film’s title might…
Utterly adventurous, João Pedro Rodrigues’s dizzying and highly personal The Ornithologist is loosely based on the life of St. Anthony of Padua and unfolds in the…
#7: High Tension Download episode here. Listen to episode here. Episode Description: On this week’s episode we delve into 2005’s High Tension, an extreme horror flick from…
#6: People Like Us Download episode here. Listen to episode here. Episode Description: As the latest version of The Mummy lurches its way into theaters, we take…
An auteurist invention of the highest order, Matías Piñeiro’s ongoing “Shakespeare series” is the ideal platform to showcase the Argentinean director’s enticing and increasingly unique…
Delivering as both a remarkable exercise in sensuousness and a wholly affecting look at suffocated identity, Barry Jenkins’s second film is one of remarkable intimacy,…
Cinema’s nominal purveyor of ruralism, most successfully of the Southern sort, Jeff Nichols is the de facto director to handle a story such as the one…
After last year’s tepidly-received Journey to the Shore proved a curious misfire, Kiyoshi Kurosawa chose to return to the familiar motifs of his most successful…