The lynchpin scene in Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers, an overheated yet deliciously entertaining sports drama, arrives around 30 minutes into the film and finds our three…
One of the great “what ifs?” for filmgoers of a certain age is the now somewhat faded-from-memory Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino collaboration From Dusk Till…
Of all contemporary genres, horror seems the most susceptible to pastiche and the endless recycling of familiar tropes. Sequels and reboots are released at…
With our own culture marginalized, when it isn’t being stripped for its most clean and convenient parts, queer people have often taken back from…
Guy Ritchie has always been a bit of an aggressive but empty stylist. Right out of the gate with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking…
“That woman deserves her revenge and we deserve to die.” Twenty years and six months ago, Quentin Tarantino left audiences wanting blood. Well, even…
Imtiaz Ali, classified as an auteur for skewering the conventional (in)sensibility of Bollywood’s melodramatic romances, is actually somewhat unclassifiable. He began his career in…
The “gay bathhouse” comes from a rich and storied tradition, from 15th-century Florence to 19th-century Paris to 20th-century New York City. Featuring an assortment…
A specter is haunting cinema — that of commercial modernity. The media powers of the hyper-modern world, unlike the institutions of Old Europe with…
Daishi Matsunaga’s gay romantic drama, Egoist, based on Makoto Takayama’s autobiographical novel of the same name, follows Kōsuke Saitō (Ryohei Suzuki), a gay fashion…
A pregnant woman nearing delivery self-pleasures by rubbing her privates against a bedpost. An attempted murder, in a flavor reminiscent of the book of…
There are two films that writer-director Zarrar Kahn struggles to reconcile in his feature-length debut In Flames. The first, a domestic drama about women…
With Yannick, filmmaker and absurdist Quentin Dupieux has synthesized the irreverent, a product of his usual gags and conceits, and the satirical, afforded by…
Although Goran Stolevski’s third film only features one gay sex scene and next to no same-sex romantic intimacy, Housekeeping for Beginners has a claim…
Fewer subgenres in recent memory have had a more fleeting window of viability, if ever it even really existed, than the “pandemic film.” Beyond…
Of Living Without Illusion A long take is a relationship. It looks still and it contains and collides all its insides. Details from earlier…
New Directors/New Films takes a certain amount of pride in the names they’ve launched, and it’s not unjustified: any festival that can boast Hou…
A long take is a relationship. It looks still and it contains and collides all its insides. Details from earlier — in the film,…