The Glorias is shallow hagiography that fails to complicate the fascinating person it seeks to showcase. In July, Harper’s Magazine published “A Letter on Justice and…
Coastal Elites is a tone-deaf and formally lazy film that ignores issues of substance in favor of a facile call for civility. Anyone concerned that the…
The Whistlers makes the most of its basic parts, tying some nifty knots and glossing up proceedings, but it fails to offer anything memorable. Corneliu Porumboiu’s The…
A barrage of cuts set to the metronome of a ticking clock fragments the daily routine in and around a meat market in the opening…
Depiction of extreme pain is not the most distressing thing about Finnish BDSM comedy Dogs Don’t Wear Pants. Frequent scenes of a dominatrix strangling a…
With the distinct air of an artist desperate to cobble together a personal story out of some old rusty parts, III is a film absolutely…
The Satanists in Hail Satan? don’t actually worship the devil, but it’d be a lot cooler if they did. Instead of ritualistic blood sacrifices and black magick,…
Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s The Lure was not, by most metrics, a hit, but it wasn’t a failure either; it made a small amount of money in…
The narrative framework of Helena Wittmann’s Drift revolves around two women, each going their own separate ways after spending some time together in northern Germany. One of the…
Early in the second half of J.C. Chandor’s Triple Frontier, Ben Affleck’s character executes a South American cocaine farmer, lying on the ground, just moments…
If Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc doesn’t scale the insurmountable heights of St. Joan films by Dreyer or Bresson, it’s for Bruno Dumont’s…
Commissioned as part of Nikkatsu’s line of Roman Porno reboots, and adherent to its rules, Sion Sono’s ANTIPORNO is, as its title suggests, a screed…
Though Romanian director Cristi Puiu sets his latest film, Sieranevada, at a family gathering commemorating the death of a late patriarch, the filmmaker has much more…
Adapted from its director’s own novel, Junko Emoto’s The Extremists’ Opera is often at its best when its roving handheld camera has the good sense…
An action-comedy in the jiangshi (hopping vampire) tradition, Vampire Cleanup Department concerns Tim (Babyjohn Choi), a nerdy loner who is bitten on the ass by…
Taira (Yuya Yagira) leaves his hometown and his little brother, Shota (Nijiro Murakami), and goes off on a journey to get into fights with just…
While initially scanning like an ultraviolent take on Richard Linklater’s freeform Slacker (early scenes find the camera roaming Vietnamese streets in search of heinous acts),…
An angry juxtaposition structures Gianfranco Rosi’s migrant crisis documentary Fire at Sea. Rather than focus solely on the struggles of refugees as they cross the…
There’s a moment late in Why Don’t You Play in Hell? that neatly sums up Sion Sono’s distinctive vision. A boy crawls through a blood-soaked…
Though it sports a few grisly images of its own, Noriko’s Dinner Table borrows most of its bloodshed from its companion film, Suicide Club. Sono…