What do you get when you cross the clickbait sensibilities of TikTok with the winking ironies of the Marvel Cinematic Universe? A confused predilection…
The artifice of acting is almost always an unwelcome thing: draw too close to metafiction, and risk divorcing the spectator from the comforts of…
The worst thing a film — or any other form of art — can do is work too hard to be about something. This…
Citizen Weiner What do you get when you cross the clickbait sensibilities of TikTok with the winking ironies of the Marvel Cinematic Universe? A…
Horror movies often demand that viewers to extend a generous amount of leeway when it comes to logic. Does it make sense that the…
They say that comedy is subjective, but even that benign truism can’t begin to explicate the lunacy at the heart of Hundreds of Beavers.…
Ma Dong-seok does it again in Netflix’s Badland Hunters. Like most of his notable roles post-Train to Busan (2016), he plays a haymaking Byronic…
Desire Lines is a hybrid film that understands the themes it wants to address, but struggles to find the formal means. Part conventional talking…
Cinema has undergone two significant, canvas-expanding innovations so far in the 21st century. The first, as ushered in especially by the films of Timur…
Cameroonian filmmaker Rosine Mbakam’s debut feature, Mambar Pierrette, opens with the mundane rhythms of domestic work. Mambar (Pierrette Aboheu Njeuthat), a seamstress in the…
Where have all the taboo romances gone? Admittedly, the trailer for Jade Halley Bartlett’s Miller’s Girl didn’t inspire much hope for their return, particularly…
In Rachel Lambert’s Sometimes I Think About Dying, the protagonist — a young office worker named Fran (Daisy Ridley) — leads a scheduled life…
From the first moments of Tótem, it’s easy to think about Lucas Dhont, which is never a good thing. Like Dhont’s recently released Close,…
For action fans of a certain persuasion (read: low- and mid-budget DTV), just seeing the names Scott Adkins, Michael Jai White, Aaron Toney, Tim…
Any new dystopian science fiction release on Netflix — TV show, live-action film, animation, short, whatever — emanates a deep sense of foreboding. This…
There’s something to be said for the classic rom-com template. Many may find the standard 90-minute course of events tired, but there’s comfort to…
In the opening of his 1994 novel A Frolic of His Own, William Gaddis writes: “Justice? – You get justice in the next world,…
Singaporean filmmaker Anthony Chen’s most impressive career achievement to-date might have come during the 2013 Golden Horse Awards, when his debut feature, Ilo Ilo,…