Broadcast Signal Intrusion is built on used parts, but Gentry executes his vision with queasy dread and necessary ambiguity. Working late nights transferring tapes of old broadcasts to disc, James comes across a strange pirate broadcast in the middle of a 1987 newscast. The images…
If there’s anything to be gleaned from Belle, it’s this: Mamoru Hosoda has thoughts about the internet. The new film from the anime auteur centers around a social media app called U, a virtual reality space in which users appear as an avatar that,…
None of Mayday‘s ideas are bold, and it presents its revolutionary possibilities as nothing more than mere daydream. At the beginning of Karen Cinnore‘s Mayday, Ana, a caterer living out of her car and beaten down by the casual misogyny that makes her life miserable,…
Love Wolf boasts a bold formal idea that’s wielded to unfortunately perfunctory ends. Jonathan Ogilvie’s Lone Wolf, a political thriller told almost entirely through mock surveillance footage, has an admittedly good hook. The police are surveilling Conrad, the radical owner of an anarchist books and…
Prisoners of the Ghostland is neither Sono nor Cage’s finest work, but it’s a good enough fix for those in need of either’s madman energy. If there’s any director working today that understands what Nicolas Cage means when he describes his style as “nouveau shamanic,”…
Malignant isn’t a start-to-finish success, but its final 30 minutes solidify it as one of the wildest, weirdest horror films in some time. In interviews and in marketing materials, Malignant is pitched as James Wan’s take on the Giallo, but while the director borrows elements…
The Judith Butler quote (from Dispossession) that opens Jun Li’s Drifting serves as a neat entry point: “Such bodies both perform the conditions of life in public—sleeping and living there, taking care of the environment and each other — and exemplify relations of equality…
From a certain perspective, there are two types of Takashi Miike movies. The director has worked in more genres across a greater number of films than almost anyone else working, but his career and his reputation can be cleanly divided into two categories: the…
In its opening moments, The Fable: The Killer Who Doesn’t Kill immediately establishes what Akira Sato (Junichi Okada), the assassin FKA Fable, can do and, better, what kind of action the film is capable of. After members of a prostitution ring are killed off…
PAW Patrol: The Movie isn’t explicitly copaganda, but it isn’t much else either: just toddler cinema designed to sell toys. In their conversation about 3 Ninjas Kick Back, Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel had one of their funniest fights. They didn’t even disagree on…
