Having now seen three of Steve McQueen’s five Small Axe films (the final two held hostage by Amazon until December), it’s easier to trace out the implied connections between these episodes/films and appreciate the filmmaker’s decision to group them together. In hindsight though, McQueen…
It’s a bit dubious to sell Hopper/Welles as a newly discovered lost work from Orson, though one can understand how that might be an enticing marketing hook within the context of the great director’s famously frustrated career. What Hopper/Welles might be more accurately described…
Steve McQueen has spent the last decade making films that are quite decidedly about America, creating a body of work in the process that carries significant cultural weight here (Oscars!) while very much representing the British filmmaker’s Euro perspective. This perspective often provides McQueen…
The Truffle Hunters is a relatively modest festival contender, though one can see why it’s found traction on the circuit, with major play at Sundance, Toronto, and now New York. Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw, who previously collaborated on the 2018 stock car racing…
North American film festivals are always stuffed full of movies that look like Shiva Baby — droll indie dramedies, built around topical, high concept premises and shot in an unassuming manner reminiscent of contemporary TV aesthetics. It’s pretty easy to be skeptical of such…
There is surely more space in Hollywood for queer cinema than ever before, but this visibility inevitably comes with an obligation to play towards the industry’s conservatism. But this is why it’s such a blessing that Bruce LaBruce continues to make the sort of…
What Frederick Wiseman does, at this point, can be boiled down to an easy elevator pitch, which at once vastly undersells the depth and subtle variations of his mode of documentary filmmaking, but also speaks to the consistency of his model. Indeed, the approach…
Swanberg’s latest represents a savvy and mature return to his early-career mode of filmmaking. Fifteen years after his first feature, Joe Swanberg is back where he started. Having spent the majority of this last decade perfecting a self-financed filmmaking model that allowed him to…
It’s not often that object sexuality (or, OS for the sake of brevity) is discussed outside the confines of lurid reality television, and as such, Zoé Wittock’s debut feature Jumbo represents somewhat unfamiliar territory. For one thing, significant studies on OS weren’t conducted until…
Spree represents a futuristic cinema, engaging both new media modes and psychologies of the digital age in a vision both appealing and deeply frightening. Spree is the movie we’ve been subconsciously anticipating for the last few years (albeit with varying levels of enthusiasm, I’m sure),…
