Much has been made about the terror of the deep blue sea and its inhabitants, and the shark movie in particular is a genre unto…
In the face of ongoing, ever-intensifying genocide, nuance is arguably out of order, and so agit-prop wisdom becomes a creative’s necessary juice. But for Israeli…
Having cemented his status with 2017’s Sweet Country — a beguiling if sometimes schematic topography of race and coloniality in the outback — as a…
There’s a deadpan finality in the titular utterance of Iair Said’s first fiction feature, a contrived despondency passing off as statistical fact. In Most People…
Stray dogs, lone horses, and rampant horniness may not make for pleasing documentary subject matter, but they add to the sense of joie de vivre…
Narrative, as academics and book club members alike will tell you, is as much about process as it is about the final product. A story…
Watching the opening credits of Mimi Cave’s Holland, one would not be entirely remiss to recall the barren sound stage of Lars von Trier’s Dogville.…
Empires, as a rule, do not exist in the plural, for each empire conceives of itself as sovereign and total. In practice, this solipsism has…
The title of Erica Xia-Hou’s stirring if conspicuous first feature is not a misprint: “banr,” translated and truncated from the Mandarin term for “partner,” serves…
Stardom is a morbid enterprise, and the life of its luminaries always has a tacit alliance with their expiration date. Often, fame intensifies upon death,…
The title appears like a misnomer. At a tight 67 minutes, and with such glorious irreverence embedded within its form, Broken Rage doesn’t even need…
Discerning between the annals and chronicles of yesteryear on one hand, and modern records of history on the other, the historian Hayden White posited a…
Genre fare has sunk to new depths with The Dead Thing, Elric Kane’s first solo-directed feature — and an enervating one at that. There’s a…
Matching the restless anomie of its cityscapes, or perhaps in contrast to their flurry of homogenous activity, Li Dongmei’s Guo Ran foregrounds an inscrutable austerity…
If simplicity forms the premise of Andrew and Sam Zuchero’s Love Me, subtlety, however, is the last thing to constitute its payoff. Taking a gamut…
Activism often dictates that form follows function, and that the message must come through at all costs — even if it should sacrifice the logic…
Every now and then, it seems, a genre film with an especially topical message enters the discursive fray to stimulate debate, provoke reaction, and tick…
As titles go, the latest from Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof epitomizes a rare fidelity to its subject. The Seed of the Sacred Fig, quite possibly…
Eternity and ephemerality are frequently taken to be worlds apart, but they each belie a wistful attitude toward the enterprise of life. In Ghost Cat…
It wouldn’t be a stretch to claim that Daaaaaalí!, Quentin Dupieux’s 77-minute portrait of the surrealist artist, is a biography of some kind. Nor would…