“Toys are too preoccupied with fun,” Alejandro (Julio Torres) declares in a cover letter to Hasbro during the opening of Torres’ debut feature film…
Where do irony and sincerity stand today, both with respect to each other and to the cultural scene at large? A litmus test for…
Hollywood film scholar Thomas Schatz’s essay “Film Genre and the Genre Film” describes our relationship with the film genre as both static and dynamic.…
Russell Crowe plays ex-cop Roy Freeman in the mystery thriller Sleeping Dogs, a film that feels like it was made dispassionately by a committee…
With so much modern horror based in ’80s VHS nostalgia or mired in transmuting trauma, it’s enough that Late Night with the Devil’s set…
Rowdy Herrington’s 1989 opus Road House is, in the unironic view of this writer, a bona fide classic and one of the best American…
How old were you when you recognized that the villain of Ivan Reitman’s original Ghostbusters was the Environmental Protection Agency? Obviously, it’s the text…
Joe McNally says he still sees things through nine-year-old eyes — eyes that, now in their late-’50s, once witnessed the murder of his teenage…
Despite the desperate urgency of the film’s subject matter, Virpi Suutari’s Once Upon a Time in a Forest takes its time. Lush and languid…
Part of a generation of First Nations filmmakers that also includes Rachel Perkins (Radiance, Bran Nue Dae), Warwick Thornton (Samson and Delilah, Sweet Country,…
Achilles, the debut feature from Iranian director Farhad Delaram, is fairly unusual in a number of ways, often displaying a frankness regarding oppression that…
To the uninitiated, written descriptions of Radu Jude’s cinema might give the wrong impression of his films as dizzyingly dialectical exercises requiring a complete…
It’s hard not to view Knit’s Island as a sort of analogous, lo-fi version of something like Ready Player One. Strip away the virtuousic…
A curious counterpoint to Celine Song’s much-lauded Past Lives may be found in Mimang, Kim Tae-yang’s feature debut, and the relative prestige of the…
Even in New York, there often seem to be more experimental films and videos out there than any single venue could ever hope to…
“400,000 FMG isn’t a wage,” one Malagasy car wash customer admits to documentarian Michaël Andrianaly’s camera in regard to the workers at the wash.…
Irish Wish marks the second collaboration between Janeen Damian and Lindsay Lohan, after their lukewarm yet distinctly feel-good Falling for Christmas. Far from the…
Some of the most unique and provocative films of recent times have been works we might call anthropological docudramas. Adopting and expanding the tradition…