by Daniel Gorman

Fullt Realized Humans is a half-realized film, awkwardly sliding between authenticity and sitcom superficiality. Bland but inoffensive, Joshua Leonard’s post-mumblecore rom-com Fully Realized Humans resembles nothing so much as the 2010s era of indie sitcoms on FX, stuff like Louis C.K.’s Louie and Pamela Adlon’s Better Things.…

The Boy Behind the Door doesn’t do much that hasn’t been seen before, but mostly works on the strength of its careful, expert craft. A tough, tense little thriller, David Charbonier and Justin Powell’s The Boy Behind the Door wastes no time in setting up its…

Rock, Paper and Scissors starts off beguilingly odd, but fails to ever realize its genre potency and soon falls into wheel-spinning. There’s something very wrong with Maria Jose (Valeria Giorcelli) and her younger brother Jesus (Pablo Sigal). Living a hermetic existence in the dilapidated…

Settlers offers neither genre thrills nor any real interrogation of the material’s potentially rich subtext. Part sci-fi thriller, part western, part survivalist drama, Wyatt Rockefeller’s Settlers has a lot of familiar genre antecedents, but not much of a clue of what to do with them.…

 “I find ghosts in Japanese horror much more terrifying. In the standard American horror canon, because a ghost violently attacks you or comes after you, at least you have the chance to fight back… but if they don’t attack you then the best you…

First published in 1967, Joan Didion’s essay Goodbye to All That details her arrival to, and eventual departure from, New York City, where she would spend the better part of her 20s. It’s a tumultuous time in most people’s lives, and Didion chronicles how her early…

Radu Muntean might not be as well known in the U.S. as his Romanian New Wave compatriots Cristi Puiu, Cristian Mungiu, or Corneliu Porumboiu, but he’s been putting together a small, quietly devastating body of work, honing in on the lives of ordinary people and…

It feels churlish to criticize Shlomi Elkabetz’s Black Notebooks project, a deeply personal documentary that’s part travelogue, part diary entry, and part remembrance for his deceased sister, the great Israeli actress and filmmaker Ronit Elkabetz. Presented in discrete halves, Part 1: Viviane and Part 2: Ronit, Shlomi is attempting a…

A breathless, even primal, survival thriller, Haider Rashid’s Europa works like gangbusters as a propulsive bit of genre filmmaking, but less so as the empathetic portrait of asylum seekers it tries to shoehorn in as a framing device. Beginning with title cards imparting information…

Beginning in September 1941, German soldiers massacred somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 people at the Babi Yar ravine outside of Kiev, capital city of Ukraine, including Jews, Soviet prisoners of war, communists, Ukrainian nationalists, and Roma. The first documented killings transpired on September 29…