Ten years after his debut feature, Looking for Cherry Blossoms (2009), actor-turned-director Joe Odagiri‘s belated follow-up, They Say Nothing Stays the Same, was selected in a sidebar of last year’s Venice Film Festival. A meditative lamentation for a defunct way of life, the film…
Miss Juneteenth is a delicate, gentle film arriving at a defining moment in American discourse surrounding race. Miss Juneteenth, the debut directorial feature of Channing Godfrey Peoples, could hardly come at a more important moment for the black community, and her authentic drama about an…
Quentin Dupieux’s latest delivers the expected outlandishness but won’t live long in viewers’ memories. The life of a sociopath is laid bare in Quentin Dupieux’s macabre satire Deerskin, in which Academy Award Winner Jean Dujardin plays Georges, a man who spends his life savings on a…
A White, White Day is an uneven story of overcoming trauma that fails to muster the requisite pathos for its thematic material. Iceland’s Oscar entry this year, A White, White Day is a somber bereavement drama in which police chief Ingimundur (Ingvar Sigurdsson), who is grieving the…
An utterly predictable narrative exercise, And Then We Danced salvages some intrigue in the celebration and presentation of its titular art. A familiar tale rears its head in Levin Akin‘s And Then We Danced, this year’s submission from Sweden for the International Feature Film Oscar. By their nature,…
Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, Chinonye Chukwu’s grim death row drama Clemency begins with a lethal injection gone wrong, which results in a prisoner experiencing an especially agonizing end. Dealing with the controversial issue of capital punishment, still…
The instantly ravishing Portrait of a Lady on Fire is Céline Sciamma’s grandest film to date, even if its story feels somewhat familiar. Winner of the Queer Palm at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, it is the latest in the French filmmaker’s oeuvre to observe young women…
Having recently explored heroin-heavy, vagabond living in Heaven Knows What (2014) and a bank robber’s desperation in Good Time (2017), directors Benny and Josh Safdie glimpse a different class of criminal underworld in Uncut Gems, an audacious, hysterical window into the shady dealings of New York City jeweller Howard Ratner…
Ever since Eve’s Bayou, Kasi Lemmons has foregrounded the need for black adolescents to realize the importance of their influence and existence in a society fundamentally unjust to them. This specific thematic concern may situate her as uniquely qualified to tell the story of African American…
Religious resentment dominates the order of service in Fernando Meirelles‘ The Two Popes, an adaptation of acclaimed screenwriter Anthony McCarten’s play about the unexpected resignation of Pope Benedict XVI. Commencing with the death of John Paul II and the election of his successor Joseph Ratzinger…
