In 2002, Olivier Assayas’ Demonlover premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival to a storm of controversy, eclipsed — for better or worse…
“Starting positions” was the ominous refrain Dale Cooper’s evil doppelgänger used, in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return, during an arm wrestling showdown; something…
Madness is the cross to bear for majesty, or so the sentiment goes; insofar as one seeks absolution from mediocrity, one finds it in…
The psychoanalytic term of the “big Other” is a fancy shorthand for our symbolic social order, and it’s what delimits most of our everyday…
For theists, the problem of evil has presented a nagging counterpoint to unchallenged belief in God, though sometimes it is precisely the challenge of…
Death and destruction are the mainstays of war, but it is war’s fatigue — long-drawn and uncertain, for both its combatants and victims —…
The modern straight white male, as an ideal, is an emasculated species: living under cosmopolitan values with none of its urbane anachronisms, he knows…
Every now and then, it seems, a genre film with an especially topical message enters the discursive fray to stimulate debate, provoke reaction, and…
Conspicuously absent from the fall festival circuit, Fatih Akin’s Rhinegold bowed at the Filmfest Hamburg back in October 2022, and is only now getting…
Without further context, one could be forgiven for conflating Skywalkers: A Love Story with yet another Star Wars spinoff. Donning the Jedi’s patronymic and…
Parables, as with social satires, have been considered both ripe for adaptation and stubbornly resistant to reinterpretation; although Kafka and Orwell have seen their…
Republics, as it were, are spaces of contradiction — the citizens’ collective supreme authority refracted through the figures of their representatives — whose political…
As documentaries go, the subject of plant life tends to suffer from a lack of tangible movement. Inertia, ascribed to the slow-moving, still hearkens…
There is a provocation inherent in the depiction of sex as sensation: shed the vows and the assurances of deep emotional connection, and all…
Enzo (Georgios Giokotos) and Magda (Astrid Drettner) are brother and sister, but they don’t always get along, and their rocky relationship has had its…
The murder mystery has proven conducive, in recent years, for mashing up tired genre formulae. It has also provided a studded launching pad, marketing…
The provocations of the Italian poet, critic, and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini have been, for contemporary viewers, largely condensed into that one magnum opus…
In Tiger Stripes, Amanda Nell Eu’s debut feature, a trio of twelve-year-old girls contend with the sudden and inexplicable physical changes that occur inside…