Awake is more likely to put viewers to sleep than scratch any genre film itch. In Awake, Netflix’s latest high-concept thriller, Gina Rodriguez stars as Jill, an ex-military widow and recovering addict whose already precarious grasp on the world is upended by an inexplicable global…
What does the end of the world look like to a group of middle school girls? In Kwon Min-pyo and Seo Han-sol’s debut film, Short Vacation, four friends embark on a meandering mission to find out, spurred by an enigmatic prompt from their photography…
Things Heard and Seen might not thrill horror purists, but its terror-flecked study of domesticity and religion both recalls genre giants and remains mostly fresh. According to Shari Springer Berman, who co-directed Netflix’s newest adaption, Things Heard and Seen, alongside her husband Robert Pulcini,…
When I was 22, my best friend and I lived together for a while in the apartment where I grew up. We were a twenty-minute walk from the subway’s last stop, in a neighborhood that was years away from any semblance of trendiness. My…
Exodus tantalizes with the possibility of incisive critique, but ultimately paints a fairly empty picture. Exodus, the debut feature by cinematographer-turned-director Logan Stone, is a peculiarly insular version of a standard post-apocalyptic thriller. Stone’s vision of America seven years after the Rapture is nearly indistinguishable…
Moon, 66 Questions, the debut feature from Greek director Jacqueline Lentzou, opens with a series of grainy home video clips with dates from roughly 25 years ago imprinted in the top left corner. In voiceover, a young woman named Artemis (Sofia Kokkali) tells a…
The myth of Orpheus seems to tell us that in the face of overwhelming grief, the hardest thing to do is have faith that things will get better. Grief-stricken after the death of his wife, he seeks out Hades himself and is told: Eurydice…
Space Sweepers boasts of welcome vein of social commentary but is hampered by endless plot convolutions and a pivot into cheap platitudes. Man first walked on the moon a little over 50 years ago, and since then, we’ve already managed to fill the cosmos with…
In and Of Itself isn’t without its small hypocrisies, but ultimately surprises by delivering spectacle through its big heart and humanism. From 2016 to 2018, the illusionist and performer Derek DelGaudio ran a one-man show in New York and Los Angeles called In & Of…
When Olivier Assayas’s Irma Vep came out in 1996, the brash, freewheeling experimentalism of the French New Wave was already long in the rearview. Luc Besson was pumping out reliably stylized action-thrillers like La Femme Nikita and Léon. Saccharine crowd-pleasers like Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie…
