Broadcast Signal Intrusion is built on used parts, but Gentry executes his vision with queasy dread and necessary ambiguity. Working late nights transferring tapes of old broadcasts to disc, James comes across a strange pirate broadcast in the middle of a 1987 newscast. The images…
André De Toth is one of the great, unsung directors of Hollywood’s Golden Age. As Fred Camper noted in a 1997 essay bemoaning his lack of stature, De Toth receives only a cursory nod in Andrew Sarris’s canonical The American Cinema, with barely a…
The Last Duel is another win for Scott, an agreeably brutal, wickedly incisive tale that is considerably more substantive than mere Rashomon comps. Blending his lavish but gritty historical epics like Gladiator or Kingdom of Heaven with the sorta-high-concept pop feminism of G.I. Jane or Thelma…
If Pedro Almodóvar’s pandemic short The Human Voice hinted at a freshly energized director liberated from the burden of expectations, then his latest feature crystallizes this as fact. His first feature since the success of Pain & Glory finds Almodóvar in peak form, delivering…
Next only to dead wives, doomed love triangles, abusive parents, and being “the chosen one,” precocious, quirky children might be the single most annoying and commonly relied-on narrative cliche commercial cinema has to offer. They’re usually paired with a grumpy adult for any given…
Released in 1988, Jane B. par Agnés V. stands as both a major work in the filmography of Agnés Varda and one of the rare essential instances of cinematic celebrity biography. Varda’s film positions the British star/model/actress/singer as both subject and active collaborator with…
In a late scene in Chameleon Street, Wendell B. Harris, Jr.’s 1990 film, an astonishingly brilliant and wickedly comedic interrogation of American racism’s corrosive effects on those forced to navigate its nearly impossible psychic and societal demands, the film’s protagonist and antihero Douglas Street…
Parallel Mothers If Pedro Almodóvar’s pandemic short The Human Voice hinted at a freshly energized director liberated from the burden of expectations, then his latest feature crystallizes this as fact. His first feature since the success of Pain & Glory finds Almodóvar in peak…
The Velvet Underground proves an interesting resting place for a litany of period detritus, but stumbles when foregrounding its titular subjects. Todd Haynes, a noted semiotician, tends to reconstruct rather than document, reincorporating tokens of his beloved ’60s and beyond into parallel narratives, as in…
After Asako I & II, Hamaguchi’s latest can’t help but feel like something of a step backward into less aesthetically daring filmmaking. “Once Again”, the third and final chapter of Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s new omnibus film Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, begins with a crawl of…
