Jeux de plage, the debut feature from Japanese director Aimi Natsuto, is a film that’s more than eager to engage with the greats of French…
The enduring impulse to defamiliarize — that is, to (re-)present something as novel or new — is at the heart of Peter Parlow’s The Plagiarists. Directed from…
Jim Jarmusch’s new horror-comedy, The Dead Don’t Die, is a missive from the other side. For one thing, it’s a zombie film in the tradition…
With films like D.A. Pennebaker’s seminal 1967 documentary Don’t Look Back and Todd Haynes’s shapeshifting 2007 musical drama I’m Not There, the cinema has maintained…
The primary appeal of Dominga Sotomayor’s Too Late to Die Young is its seductive portrayal of a liminal state. Set in a bohemian commune in…
“Sensuous,” “gorgeous, “evocative” — such descriptors are perhaps too easily applied to Ash Mayfair’s The Third Wife, a film that, from its opening frames, seems…
The most striking aspect of Weekend Lover, the directorial debut of Sixth Generation Chinese filmmaker Lou Ye, is its palpable sense of existence as a…
Under the Silver Lake, the third feature from writer-director David Robert Mitchell, is the kind of ambitious, self-indulgent project destined to appeal only to a…
In Dario Argento’s Deep Red, the piercing visions of a Jewish-German telepath (Macha Méril) serve as an embodiment of this Italian master’s worldview: to look is to…
Frequently inscrutable and often enveloped in literal darkness, Andrea Bussmann’s Fausto offers the latest (cinematic) rumination on the foundational myth of man’s dealings with the…
Brothers of the Night concerns a loose network of young Bulgarian men who, unable to find work in Vienna, instead prowl the city streets selling…
If A City of Sadness represents Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien’s greatest achievement to date — an assessment that its Venice Golden Lion and long-standing reputation would seem to…
“I don’t want to be an example. I just want to be a girl,” says Lara (Victor Polster), the title character of Girl, Lukas Dhont’s highly acclaimed…
In taking on the horrors of Vietnam, Brian De Palma’s Casualties of War may be said to mark a departure for the American director of…
“This is the feverish, painful expression of a man who lives in mortal fear of his own mediocrity,” concludes Dave Kehr’s negative Chicago Reader review…
Skipping elliptically across 15 or so years in an economical 84 minutes, Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War tells of the tumultuous, postwar love affair between Wiktor…
Tired of superhero origin stories? Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is here to fix that. The film’s nominal hero is Brooklyn teenager Miles Morales (Shameik Moore), who’s…
Dovlatov observes six days in the life of the eponymous Russian writer (here played by Milan Marić), beginning on November 1, 1971. That compressed timeline…
Composed of six dime-store tales from the frontier — complete with color plates! — and boasting an appropriately storybook feel (courtesy of cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel,…
The Wild Boys opens with a shimmering black-and-white title card, an homage to Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks, and voiceover that soon takes the viewer back to…