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…
Frat lives fall flat. That, at least to the outsider, is a reasonable conclusion to draw from the many unwelcome instances of its bearers disrupting…
“Our dominance is supreme and our isolation is profound.” These words, taken from N. Scott Momaday’s essay, “A Storyteller and His Art,” pronounce the condition…
Not much is said about the blemishes of an auteur’s career, especially if they prove to be wholly uncharacteristic of its maker’s blueprint. Idiosyncratic in…
Cinema’s obsessions with images are the result of its propensity for their proliferation: although literature tempts the wayward imagination, cinema is what drives it truly…
“Someone’s inside.” These two words, uttered with ominous clarity, spur Jason Yu’s invigorating debut, Sleep, into malevolent and mysterious somnolence; for in the world of…
Pascal Plante’s third feature, Red Rooms, premiered at last year’s Karlovy Vary Film Festival, before screening to both critical and popular acclaim at Fantasia, where it…
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 about…
Madness is the cross to bear for majesty, or so the sentiment goes; insofar as one seeks absolution from mediocrity, one finds it in a…
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 lives…
For theists, the problem of evil has presented a nagging counterpoint to unchallenged belief in God, though sometimes it is precisely the challenge of proving…
Death and destruction are the mainstays of war, but it is war’s fatigue — long-drawn and uncertain, for both its combatants and victims — that…
The modern straight white male, as an ideal, is an emasculated species: living under cosmopolitan values with none of its urbane anachronisms, he knows his…