Preparations is a major discovery, its distinct character recalling nothing less than the works of Abbas Kiarostami, Christian Petzold, and Krzysztof Kieślowski. Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time opens with a grand romantic gesture. After 20 years in the United States,…
Atlantis is an unsettling, poignant study of the casual violence that both informs the past and estimates the future. With Atlantis, director Valentyn Vasyanovych (also editor and cinematographer here) has created a dystopian nightmare out of Ukraine’s current political and social quagmire with Russia. Like…
Outside the Wire boasts enough requisite action fodder to keep things moving, but in failing to meaningfully develop any of its ideas, become little more than a rah-rah recruitment film. January has long been an annual dumping ground, giving studios a chance to quietly release…
Locked Down wants to be the film of this pandemic moment but is instead tiresomely repetitive, tonally chaotic, and already outdated. A January 6th puff piece from Variety lays out the wildly accelerated production schedule of the new Covid-19 heist-comedy Locked Down, detailing how director…
Imagine my surprise when a cursory online search revealed that virtually no critic of note has written a modern reassessment of the 1986 serial-killer-road-movie cum neo-western The Hitcher. Barely released into theaters, the film was a financial failure and was roundly eviscerated by critics —…
Shadow in the Cloud holds some promise in its early genre goings, but the second half reveals an unfortunate dearth of ideas and charm. It’s never a great sign when a feature-length film begins by putting a lampshade on its own obvious antecedent. Case in…
With The Midnight Sky, George Clooney the director strikes again, delivering a bland, ugly film that is tedious and void of any emotional poignancy. George Clooney might be an A-list actor, but at this point in his career, it seems safe to say that…
A deeply idiosyncratic survey of 20th-century political and social mores, director Pietro Marcello’s Martin Eden transplants Jack London’s 1909 novel from the American West Coast to a liminal version of Italy situated somewhere in a limbo between the turn of the century and the…
News of the World is a film of dangerously naïve messaging, erratic pacing, limited stakes, and little formal or technical craft to otherwise distract from such weaknesses. The Western was arguably the most popular genre in the world from roughly 1910 until the 1960s,…
Hunter Hunter begins as a simple look at a family living off-the-grid, but quickly develops into a gory thriller that isn’t for the faint of heart. It wouldn’t be entirely correct to call the new survival-thriller film Hunter Hunter a bait-and-switch; there’s no twist, exactly,…
