Clio Barnard’s 2010 debut film The Arbor, a documentary/fiction hybrid based on the play by acclaimed writer Andrea Dunbar, features a fascinating formal gambit in which actors lip-synced to actual archival recordings of Dunbar and her daughter, Lorraine. Barnard’s subsequent films, 2013’s The Selfish…
Copshop finds Joe Carnahan at the top of his game, with the requisite violence, humor, and plot intricacies to sell this brand of genre bombast. Thanks to pandemic-related delays, we’re being gifted (or threatened with, depending on one’s tolerance for his brand of smart-ass macho bluster)…
Shot on location in a small town on the border between Brazil & Argentina, writer/director Agustina San Martín’s To Kill the Beast occupies a woozy, liminal space between coming-of-age narrative and dreamy reverie. In her video introduction to the film, San Martín calls it…
Riz Ahmed has made a well-deserved leap from character actor to leading man status in his recent work, beginning with the prestige HBO drama The Night Of and then his rapturously received performance in last year’s Sound of Metal. He’s currently garnering accolades for…
Rob Savage burst on to the scene last year with the surprise success of Host, a 60-minute horror film shot during COVID lockdowns that transpired entirely via Zoom. It was a clever use of the suddenly ubiquitous Screenlife genre, and genuinely scary, showcasing Savage’s…
There’s nothing particularly novel about Oleg Sentsov’s Rhino, a rise-and-fall gangster narrative about a Ukrainian tough guy who carves a bloody swath through his enemies for the better part of two decades before making a tentative stab at redemption. But in Sentsov’s hands this…
While Ukrainian writer/director Valentin Vasyanovych has been making films for a number of years, his breakthrough didn’t come until 2019’s Atlantis, which garnered awards at several festivals and became his first film to receive some kind of wider distribution. Atlantis detailed a hypothetical, near-future…
Stanley Kwan has never achieved the same level of critical renown here in America as his countryman Wong Kar-wai, which seems most certainly in large part is due to his sporadic (at best) distribution record: Center Stage (aka Actress), generally considered his greatest film…
Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is famous for its portrayal of an inscrutable facial expression, that indelible half-smirk-half-smile that serves as a kind of Rorschach test for the viewing public. It’s appropriate, then, that the name is bestowed upon the main character in Ana…
Martyrs Lane is the latest horror film built around a metaphor for trauma in which boredom and cliche trump any catharsis. There’s a palpable sense of melancholy at the heart of writer/director Ruth Platt’s Martyrs Lane, a ghost story that largely eschews scares in…
