The Eyes of Tammy Faye indulges the very spectacle it supposedly interrogates, betraying its aims and offering only a flattened take on its titular subject. The rise of evangelism has had no small impact on the cultural and political dynamics of America today, having —…
To make an effective political film, one frequently turns to documentary as the best medium for truth; it’s hard to deny in exemplars of the genre that empirical rigor and emotional realism often prevail over shoddier, more selective depictions of subject matter. But documentary…
“It’s your show I’m cancelling, not you,” remarks one character to another in The Accusation, encapsulating, intentionally or otherwise, the thorny politics at the heart of the film. That Yvan Attal’s seventh directorial feature exists in its present form — that is, in its…
Flag Day’s aesthetic cribbing and histrionic character result in a floundering film that feels too desperate by half. The realm of biography occupies an uneasy position between narration and narrativization; its sweeping strokes complement and contradict personal undercurrents in equal measure, and it is…
More famously known for his visual effects work on such timeless classics as Star Wars and Jurassic Park, Phil Tippett never quite successfully pivoted into filmmaking proper. While his illustrious career saw him recognized with various accolades (including Oscars and Emmys aplenty) in both…
CODA‘s personal storytelling and intelligent subversion of its middlebrow formulae make for a surprisingly affecting viewing experience. The title of Siân Heder’s sophomore feature is twofold: an acronym for the “child of deaf adults,” and the concluding passage or movement of a music piece.…
Nine Days angles toward profundity, but is a largely maudlin, intellectually bankrupt genre-exercise of self-congratulation. In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, prisoners sit facing a wall on which the shadows of puppets are projected; with no conception of a world beyond their own, the prisoners…
Kandisha doesn’t quite rise to the directors’ past heights, but remains both riveting and probing in its own right. With horror, thriller, and the many mash-ups of the two proliferating under the dreaded confines of pandemic filmgoing (hunkered down, for most, with oneself or…
Mandibles is a profoundly audacious film, moronic and masterful in equal measure. Perhaps the most unbefitting title to arrive in the middle of a global pandemic, Quentin Dupieux’s Mandibles defies the current for two reasons. That its titular appendage serves a wholly positive function —…
The films of Hong Sang-soo, ever so magical yet construed from the affairs of quotidian encounters, every minimal gesture compounding a maximal observation, have over the past two decades established through their associative textures a cinematic canon of sorts; a canon whose shared DNA translates,…
