The conceit of Nadia Conners’ The Uninvited brings to mind plays by the likes of Sam Shepard and Harold Pinter: a wealthy Los Angeles couple…
It’s not exactly a novel idea that many young queer people idealize pop divas to the point of over-identification, and it’s equally well-established culturally that…
The historical biopic is a cinematic genre defined more by its pitfalls than its merits, laden as these films can be with historical revisionism, unintended…
Sigrid Nunez’s 2018 novel The Friend was a critical success — winning that year’s National Book Award for Fiction — that also managed to find…
In his expansive body of work as a playwright, Harold Pinter dissected the language of power with a scalpel. Characters speak in clipped, ambiguous sentences,…
Director Craig Johnson has worked with alums of Saturday Night Live before: His 2014 film The Skeleton Twins featured nuanced leading performances from Kristen Wiig…
The title of Claire Burger’s film Foreign Tongue holds both literal and symbolic meaning: its leading characters, French and German teenagers Fanny (Lilith Grasmug) and…
A few key components of Christopher Andrews’ Bring Them Down, his full-length directorial debut, may bring to mind another small-scale Irish drama that recently brought…
Writer-director Aaron Rookus’ film De Idylle (Dutch for Idyllic) presents an interconnected menagerie of death-haunted people — like all of us, they fear death, crave…
The first shot of Julian Chou’s film Blind Love is both jarring and literal: a closeup of a doctor draining a cyst under a twitching…
Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here, after premiering at last year’s Venice Film Festival and winning the festival’s prize for Best Screenplay, amassed an unforeseen level…
David Lynch died on January 15, 2025, five days before his 79th birthday, and as obituaries and remembrances poured forth, certain descriptors of his films…
The village schoolteacher, taciturn but possessed of intellectual passions, plays a newly delivered recording of Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” for his class, most of whom…
The existence of Mufasa: The Lion King, the Barry Jenkins-directed prequel to Jon Favreau’s 2019 photorealistic remake of The Lion King, raises an interesting set…
In his film adaptation of August Wilson’s play The Piano Lesson, director Malcom Washington approaches his source material with both reverence and flexibility, providing space…
Humphrey Bogart was one of the most prolific and widely admired actors of the Hollywood studio system, and though he is still known for the…
When asked to name the scariest films ever made in 2013, Martin Scorsese chose Robert Wise’s 1963 film The Haunting as his top selection —…