Horizon Line

Monday is a derivative, dull, and altogether flat effort that captures none of the carefree spirit it partially peddles. With an overly familiar and intentionally simple plot, one that, on its face, resembles Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy, and boasting camerawork that lightly mimics the images…

Gunda is an empty, exploitative aesthetic exercise that that has no ideas to speak of. If nothing else — and it truly offers little else — Viktor Kosakovskiy’s Gunda serves as a handy catalogue of contemporary film-festival affectation. Although it nominally concerns the lives of…

Moffie is a visually striking film but one which suffers for failing to fully commit to the ugliness inherent to its narrative. Moffie is the sort of prestige drama that possesses all of the hallmarks of so-called important filmmaking, but one which fails to…

Slalom is a raw and unpretentious study of trauma and the ways in which young women can wrest back control of their own course. The slalom belongs to a group of Olympic events whose competition is built around the descent. Unlike a sport like…

Funny Face works as genre deconstruction and cinema of a certain geography, but its attempts at explicit commentary are less successful. Tim Sutton is a director at least in part characterized by his pursuit of a sort of Kubrickian auteurism; each successive film markedly…

Nina Wu‘s early patience and promise unfortunately gives way to a more sensationalized, ill-conceived study of trauma. Hailed as Taiwan’s answer to the #MeToo movement — a bizarre, flip cultural essentialism for its apparent belief in the historical discontinuity of art centered around accountability,…

This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection is a remarkable debut, a tonally complex and visually sumptuous marvel. Existing in a kind of liminal space between ethnographic documentary and dream-like fable, Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese’s This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection charts the inexorable…

Shiva Baby thrives as the kind of festival-circuit dramedy that overcomes the genre’s twee stigma thanks to its surprising restraint and refinement. North American film festivals are always stuffed full of movies that look like Shiva Baby — droll indie dramedies, built around topical,…

Wojnarowicz is a powerful docu-bio that looks to celebrate the life and radical ethos of its eponymous trailblazer.   At a time when queer art is more mainstream than ever, it’s a good exercise to look back and reflect on its radical roots. While it’s obviously…

City of Lies is deeply trite in its messaging, but given its prolonged stay on the shelf, isn’t as bad as you might expect. Arriving nearly three years after its intended release date due to star Johnny Depp’s legal woes and a bankrupt distributor, director…