Nine Days angles toward profundity, but is a largely maudlin, intellectually bankrupt genre-exercise of self-congratulation. In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, prisoners sit facing a wall on which the shadows of puppets are projected; with no conception of a world beyond their own, the prisoners…
Kandisha doesn’t quite rise to the directors’ past heights, but remains both riveting and probing in its own right. With horror, thriller, and the many mash-ups of the two proliferating under the dreaded confines of pandemic filmgoing (hunkered down, for most, with oneself or…
Mandibles is a profoundly audacious film, moronic and masterful in equal measure. Perhaps the most unbefitting title to arrive in the middle of a global pandemic, Quentin Dupieux’s Mandibles defies the current for two reasons. That its titular appendage serves a wholly positive function —…
The films of Hong Sang-soo, ever so magical yet construed from the affairs of quotidian encounters, every minimal gesture compounding a maximal observation, have over the past two decades established through their associative textures a cinematic canon of sorts; a canon whose shared DNA translates,…
A tacked-on melancholy shoulders, for the most part, the dramatic weight present in C.B. Yi’s carefully composed and frequently arresting first feature. Moneyboys, as its titular plurality suggests, calls into focus not just personal biography, of which its half-decade account is largely constituted, but…
Set in an alternate Brazil where evangelical conservatism has all but annexed its inhabitants under a state of lulling conformity, Anita Rocha da Silveira’s unabashedly satirical Medusa is itself fraught with a moralistic excess that, luckily, finds its contrapuntal partner in a measured yet…
One of the biggest pitfalls of depicting and representing trauma arrives precisely and most insidiously in what appears to be its greatest strength: by grafting inordinate quantities of both rational context and emotional pretext onto the backdrop of a larger social milieu, many films…
First Date endows its stock premise with a zany amateurism that is simultaneously cool and cringeworthy. First Date, the debut feature of directorial duo Manuel Crosby and Darren Knapp, has a gonzo sensibility that threatens, on occasion, to undermine its claims to baseline competency. The…
Unlike recent duds Mainstream and PVT Chat, Zola is a film that cuttingly, brutally understands what it is to be Extremely Online. No film better encapsulates the callous ferocity of our strikingly virtual and sleekly hyper-real era than one conceived within its very nethers. This carnal metaphor…
The hare-brained Queen of Spades rides a wave of stale familiarity to miserable results. For viewers whose formative years have nourished the clickbait addiction of YouTube horror, neither the lackadaisical Queen of Spades nor the lore behind it should elicit more than a nonchalant…
