Natalia Sinelnikova’s We Might As Well Be Dead begins with a bedraggled family slowly traversing a long road through dense forest, a towering high rise…
Jonathan Rosenbaum is fond of quoting British critic and curator Michael Witt on Godard; Witt writes that “If Godard… has repeatedly suggested that the cinema…
Crimes of the Future is a fascinating, ambitious project from Cronenberg, who readily sources his own career-long preoccupations in the creation of something that feels…
After Blue is a delirious visual experience, but Mandico stretches his few ideas far too thinly, resulting in a beautiful but repetitive trudge. Bertrand Mandico’s…
It’s a common misconception of auteurism that once a filmmaker has been so designated, every film by that particular artist suddenly becomes an unimpeachable masterpiece.…
With DASHCAM, Savage threads a tricky needle of Screenlife, first-person POV, and found footage cinema, but if you can vibe with the assemblage, there are…
Perhaps the single most of-the-moment film at 2022’s Cannes, Maksym Nakonechnyi’s Butterfly Vision feels like it could be ripped from tomorrow’s headlines. A gritty war-time…
There’s an elusive, ephemeral quality to Clement Cogitore’s Sons of Ramses, a sorta-thriller that unfolds like a half-remembered dream. It’s only his second feature, following…
Given the ongoing international crisis unfolding in Ukraine, the films of Sergei Loznitsa — born in Belarus but raised in Kiev, and now living in…
There’s no doubt that a certain flavor of slow-paced, static-master-shot style filmmaking has become a film festival staple. Reporting from any major international fest will…
Black Site has obvious limitations that cap its ceiling, but as a DTV film in spirit if not in star power, it’s solid enough for target…
In a 2006 article for the online magazine Senses of Cinema titled “Mapping Catalonia in 1967: The Barcelona School in Global Context,” Rosalind Galt attempts…
The official synopsis for Kersti Jan Werdal’s Lake Forest Park reads that “a group of teenagers have to come to terms with the violent death of…
A fascinating thesis and accompanying history lesson that never quite makes sense as a feature-length film, Travis Wilkerson & Erin Wilkerson new documentary Nuclear Family is trying to…
After Noé’s career peak with Climax, Lux Æterna represents a disappointing return to the director’s haphazard stylistic tics and overindulgent edgelord sensibilities. Like fellow provocateurs Lars von…
Human Nature’s looping narrative games don’t always work, but overall the film makes for an effective study of middle-class malaise. There’s not one, but two structural/temporal gambits…
Reflection lacks the scale of Vasyanovych’s Atlantis, but its brutalist Wes Anderson-esque tenor makes for a difficult yet still hopeful study of war. While Ukrainian writer/director…
9 Bullets is a startlingly bad film, one that struggles to reach even basic competence in any individual or collective regard. In his recent book Why…
Virus: 32 isn’t reinventing the zombie film wheel, but its careful attention to craft and precise formalism mark this effort near the head of the class.…
If its title wasn’t a giveaway, Marvelous and the Black Hole is a quirk-heavy comedy that approaches authenticity in moments, only to retreat back into its…
We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is a bold, terrifying portrait of the Internet’s isolation/connection dichotomy. There’s something bracing about encountering a genuine oddity like…