Ellie Foumbi’s Our Father, the Devil takes the broad, familiar strokes of the revenge drama and fashions them into something altogether more tragic. The…
Jennifer Reeder’s new film Perpetrator has received some very strong reviews at Berlinale, and to be honest, it takes a while to figure out…
Far too many movies demand far too little from viewers. Maybe they aren’t asking the right questions, or perhaps the questions themselves are just…
The metatextual fortune cookie message (e.g. “Help! I’m being held hostage in a fortune cookie factory!”) is an obvious premise for a joke, indeed…
At first glance, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence seems to exist in opposition to its creator’s body of work. Directed and co-written by Nagisa Ôshima,…
In a recent think piece for Salon, critic Sam Adams asks “Where did all the hacks go?” He’s mainly talking about Disney’s penchant for…
Ingenuous, low-budget sci-fi is having a moment. It’s been a long time since Primer and Upstream Color, or even Coherence or Timecrimes. But recent festival offerings like The Artifice Girl and Aporia suggest…
Independent filmmaker Anna Biller (Viva, The Love Witch) recently stirred up a mini-tempest on the website formerly known as Twitter, calling out — sight…
British director Charlotte Regan’s feature debut, Scrapper, is a vibrant and charismatic film on the joys and heartbreak of adolescence and newfound fatherhood. Set…
Of all horror films, no work is referenced, paid homage, or just plain ripped-off more than The Shining. Most films are satisfied to take…
Though the blues and jazz and bluegrass and country and frankly the whole catalogue of American music comes from the American South, the region’s…
Few directors have embodied the ethos of their own films quite so fully as Robert Aldrich; fiercely independent, constantly navigating the fickle vicissitudes of…
Kamila Andini’s latest film considers the tragedy of life in her home nation of Indonesia. But despite this scope of Before, Now & Then,…
Gone are the days of Mortal Kombat, Double Dragon, BloodRayne, Max Payne, and even Warcraft. Video game adaptations used to promise a Faustian bargain…
Here’s a scenario: your day starts with a pregnancy scare. Then, you find your sister has run away from school, and on top of…
Animation is a tool that has been sporadically utilized to shade in the gaps of history within a subjective consciousness. These subjectivities often pertain…
We’ve come a long way since Mister Ed. The central gimmick of Josh Greenbaum’s Strays, an R-rated comedy about a foursome of misfit dogs…
The logline of The Adults, Dustin Guy Defa’s follow-up to Person to Person (2016), does not appreciably differ from that of a prototypical Sundance…