The hare-brained Queen of Spades rides a wave of stale familiarity to miserable results. For viewers whose formative years have nourished the clickbait addiction of YouTube horror, neither the lackadaisical Queen of Spades nor the lore behind it should elicit more than a nonchalant…
Dislocation and dissociation lie at the heart of Italian Studies, a work straddling narrative and documentary, identified precisely through its rejection of stable, reliable identity. The third feature from Adam Leon (who previously directed comedies Gimme the Loot and Tramps), Italian Studies pivots into…
In a stronger film, Tragic Jungle‘s metaphor and opacity would have a more elaborate, complex mythos to match. Yulene Olaizola’s elemental fifth feature, Tragic Jungle, is a willfully beguiling work. Set in the 1920s, in the inhospitable heart of a jungle bordering a river between…
The liminal sensibilities of Christian Petzold’s films accord their material spaces an air of contradiction: the gleaming surfaces of steel walls and glass doors exude preciousness and luxury — desirable qualities. But at the same time, it is this very preciousness and luxury that…
Even before his international recognition as one of Germany’s leading filmmakers, Christian Petzold was already cultivating and mastering his thematic and stylistic preoccupations. Bearing his serial enthusiasm for genre alongside his signature undercurrents of fleeting but doomed passion, Cuba Libre, his made-for-television second feature,…
Final Account is not just a reckoning with history, but with its present lingering, executed with uncompromising force and first-hand immediacy. Released after the death of director Luke Holland, Final Account serves as a culmination of a decade’s worth of accounts of the Final Solution…
Those Who Wish Me Dead is eminently watchable and rife with brutal genre spectacle, but never quite manages the depth of Sheridan’s prior work. In a time where cinemas around the world have steadily found themselves reopening to a viewership desperate for catch-up on long-delayed…
Spiritual faith, by virtue of its abstract and elusive qualities, rarely translates well to the visual medium, if indeed it can be translated at all. Depictions of this faith have ranged from the sacred to the sacrilegious, articulated with either austere minimalism or gratuitous…
While The Mitchells vs. the Machines doesn’t live up to obvious touchstone The Incredibles, it rides its own humorous and referential wavelength to mild success. While less an homage to superhuman wisdom and superheroic strength than its gung-ho title may imply, The Mitchells vs. the…
Every Breath You Take is a derivative, cliché-riddled yawn that would be more at home on late-night cable than on theater screens. While its title might suggest otherwise, Vaughn Stein’s third feature — after 2018’s noir-thriller Terminal and 2020’s family-drama Inheritance (not to be…
