The Final Destination franchise is anything you want it to be. Its six not-so-varied variations of death engaging in a cruelly one-sided game of…
How does one definitively characterize a child’s point of view? Is it by positioning it as a response to the stultifying cynicism of adulthood,…
There’s a moment smack in the middle of Beginning, Georgian director Dea Kulumbegashvili’s formally astute but callously cruel debut feature film about the combined…
It may seem counterintuitive to use Alfred Hitchcock’s famous quote — “Drama is life with all the boring bits cut out” — to describe…
Contemporary indie cinema may lack in quality, but it absolutely does not lack in the quantity of up-and-coming filmmakers majorly taking inspiration from the…
In this day and age of IP-driven slopbusters, any film that dares to respond to a pre-existing intellectual property is worthy. Responding requires the…
Bollywood-sanctioned social-issue dramas — competently made, left-leaning rebuttals to some of the most incompetently made right-wing propagandist dramas — tend to prioritize fierce rebellion…
“Beware of narrative and form. Their power can bring us closer to the truth, but they can also be a weapon with a great…
Whenever a film critic, especially one who has probably only played a very limited number of games in their life, argues that a film…
Ever since making Dekalog in 1989, the monumental ten-hour-long Polish-language TV series consisting of one-hour episodes based on each of the Bible’s Ten Commandments,…
“This city takes time away from you,” says one of the seven disembodied voices introducing us to the wide-awake-at-night Mumbai city in the lyrical…
Claymation, most readily identified for its craggy, almost comedic artificiality, can, in fact, most truthfully express our deepest and, at times, darkest emotions. The…
Once upon a time, the great François Truffaut said, “There’s no such thing as an anti-war film.” The details of when he said this,…
At the end of the very first (of many) verbal arguments in Azazel Jacobs’ His Three Daughters, an emotionally potent chamber drama about three…
The increasingly ballooning runtimes of auteurist projects — specially made by those who belong to the ever-expanding School of Slow Cinema — inspire more…
Mohit Ramchandani’s City Of Dreams is, in actuality, a cinema of nightmares. Or, more accurately, a cinematic nightmare. The film — which follows a…
All the markers of a classic Coen Brothers’ crime comedy are there in Potsy Ponciroli’s Greedy People — the third film released this year…
In Paul Schrader’s updated edition of his seminal film theory and criticism book, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, the writer-director of First…