Atom Egoyan’s latest is a self-serious dud that finds the director trying and failing to recall his once impressive weighty themes. There’s a certain level of absurdness that is only manifested in an auteur’s twilight years, reaching for that kind of ephemerality that once…
A Girl Missing establishes Kôji Fukada as a strong imagemaker, but the film’s weak script weighs things down. If nothing else, A Girl Missing demonstrates yet again that formal and structural invention can only do so much to rescue a truly dire script. For about half…
Saint Maud is a horror film of masterful tension and religious complication. It doesn’t take much to surmise why indie studio-of-the-moment A24 snapped up Rose Glass‘s creepy debut Saint Maud right out of the Toronto Film Festival. Pulsating as it is, this psychological horror is a masterclass…
Jenny Slate is a gift to the world. The Sunlit Night is not. The world does not deserve Jenny Slate, nor does The Sunlit Night, an inconsequential film adaptation of the 2016 critically-acclaimed novel by Rebecca Dinerstein Knight. It’s quite baffling, then, to learn that Knight…
The Rental is a serviceable if predictable thriller, but immediately situates Dave as the better director of the Franco brothers. Dave Franco must have taken a look at the expansive, eccentric filmography of older brother James and thought: if he can do it, so can…
OK, so things don’t really vanish anymore: even the most limited film release will (most likely, eventually) find its way onto some streaming service or into some DVD bargain bin assuming that those still exist by the time this sentence finishes. In other words,…
Hirokazu Kore-eda feels distinctly uninterested in his own material here, a sentiment sure to be echoed by audiences. Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda has consistently shown an affinity for highlighting the often fractured dynamics that exist within families both real and manufactured, from 1995’s Maborosi to 2018’s Palme d’Or-winning Shoplifters.…
Taking as his subject the Japanese company Family Romance LLC, director Werner Herzog returns to offer a work widely labelled as ‘strange’ by the media that renders the line between real and artificial indistinct. Titled as it is — Family Romance LLC, after the company — the film plays out…
Nobuhiko Obayashi, who passed away earlier this year, on April 10, was until recently relegated to the periphery of cinematic discussions of legacy. His status as a master filmmaker — he humbly preferred to be called a ‘film artist’ or a ‘cinematic magician’ —…
There’s a half-hour experimental short located somewhere in Cenote, one that drops the lame docu- framing device as a pretext for the gorgeous underwater footage shown and is willing to just indulge in expressive, opulent imagery. Until that massive re-editing occurs, left are the…
