Like so many pastiches before it, the thematically unfocused Dead & Beautiful succumbs to its own vacuous sheen. In the metropolitan center of Taipei, five young…
The Deep House is a claustrophobic, otherworldly bit of throwback horror that welcomingly pivots away from modern, flattened genre sensibilities. Forget indie insufferability: it seems vogue…
At the Ready engaged necessary discourse, but unfortunately leaves its most fertile sites for interrogation unexplored. In light of the surging unpopularity of its subject matter,…
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…
After the resounding triumph of On Body and Soul, a film whose stoic tenderness and tactile intimacy proved an outlier among recent Golden Bear winners, Ildikó Enyedi returns…
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…
“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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
First Date endows its stock premise with a zany amateurism that is simultaneously cool and cringeworthy. First Date, the debut feature of directorial duo Manuel Crosby…
Unlike recent duds Mainstream and PVT Chat, Zola is a film that cuttingly, brutally understands what it is to be Extremely Online. No film better encapsulates the callous…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…