The Whaler Boy undermines any potential for naturalism and rawness with slick artifice and discordant commercial style. Philipp Yuryev’s debut feature The Whaler Boy takes…
#2. Memoria opens with a sound; booming, leaden, ominous, a sound that shakes you in your seat and fades as quickly as it came.…
The moving Parallel Mothers puts on full display Almodovar’s facility with wrangling the controlled chaos of narrative into a coherent whole. If Pedro Almodóvar’s pandemic…
Nightmare Alley suffers from some tonal imbalance and isn’t always suited to its epic style, but the strength of craft and del Toro’s familiar…
There’s very little to distinguish Belfast as a work of art, a film that uses its dramatic and formal elements only in service of feel-good…
The Souvenir: Part II plays out largely as protracted epilogue, a fumbling, detached work that negates the first film’s powerful ending. Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s 1778…
The French Dispatch is the latest Wes Anderson film to be utterly encumbered by the director’s propeller-beanie twee and flattened storytelling chops. For better or…
It might surprise Western viewers watching the raw portrait of youth in Snowball to learn that its writer/director Lee Woo-jung has spent the last…
A tepid sense of familiarity sets in while watching Glenn Chan’s feature debut Shadows. From its cold-open introductory murder to the perfunctory psychiatrist on…
Last August, fresh from the premiere of time-bending action thriller Tenet, Tom Cruise giddily proclaimed: “Big movie. Big screen. Loved it.” Nolan’s movie may…
White As Snow adds a wry wrinkle of feminist reclamation to its classic storyline, but unfortunately fails to successfully execute much else. Like so many…
It’s a shame that The Braves didn’t keep its French title Entre Les Vagues (Between the Waves) for its worldwide release. Between the Waves…
The Call’s throwback vibes don’t do much to add to its predictable style and lack of notable scares. Arriving on the heels of the…
The Witches of the Orient once again testifies to Faraut’s facility with crafting surprising, poignant sports docs with plenty of formal character. It’s exciting to…
Something incredible is brewing in the Sakha Republic (Yakutia). Over the last twenty years, this large yet sparsely-populated territory situated in the far-flung and…
Caleb Michael Johnson’s sophomore feature amounts to little more than a clumsy attempt at intellectual horror. We open on a shot of a dog’s…
There is No Evil is frequently, starkly poignant, but it’s successes are somewhat mitigated by a lack of culminating cohesion. Mohammad Rasoulof wasn’t present at…
A chandelier swings in the gloom, tremulous strings kick in and tension mounts as the camera pulls in. The glinting fixture rocks back and…