As we enter the last release wave of true Covid films — those titles both produced during and concerned with the real-world crisis —…
Stop me if this synopsis sounds familiar: A mousy young woman from an outlandishly dysfunctional family finally snaps and unleashes vengeance upon her small…
When High and Low was released in 1963, Akira Kurosawa had been working his way through some of the world’s great literary works for…
Pedro Costa’s new eight-minute short film The Daughters of Fire is more daring, more formally complex, more beautiful than almost any other recent work one…
The overwrought, overexplained, overedited maximalism of modern-day blockbuster cinema is a somewhat dumbed-down version of what film theorist Tom Gunning championed early, non-narrative silent…
Uncropped In her 1977 essay collection On Photography, Susan Sontag argued that the abundance of photographic images in our culture had begun to engender…
Symbols are like Alfred Hitchcock’s (flawed) definition of drama — “life with the dull bits cut out.” Their universal appeal derives from prioritizing a…
To view history through the lens of the present frequently engenders all kinds of catharsis, from the moral smugness of the studio biopic to…
There’s no denying the contemporary trend to “narrativize” otherwise fact-based documentaries, filmmakers shaping reams of footage into something resembling the three-act structure of the…
For most of Frederick Wiseman’s career, the master documentarian has focused on the lives and institutions of the United States. His films have painted…
Ridley Scott is 85 years old and has directed, among other things, four feature films in the last five years, one of which was…
The art of adaptation precludes mere transcription, most particularly where the written word is translated to a visual medium like film. Nowhere is the…
The camera’s all-encompassing eye, famously termed the “kino-eye” by Russian filmmaker and theorist Dziga Vertov, has always been capable of revealing the mysterious and…
With his latest film Monster, Hirokazu Kore-eda has outdone himself. Rather than make one bad film, as he usually does, the Japanese director has…
When the 2018 remake of old Hollywood standby A Star is Born dropped, it marked the culmination of over a decade’s worth of effort…
The legacy of a venerated musician comprises the myriad testimonies in They Shot the Piano Player. Colleagues and family of Francisco Tenório Júnior share…
One of the most discussed Estonian films of the year, Dark Paradise is a strange beast from one of the country’s most promising and…
It’s always frustrating when the awesome beauty of manicured, ornate spectacle gets caught in a quagmire of its own ideological reduction. When aesthetics, so…