Glimpses from a Visit to Orkney in Summer 1995 is perhaps the most categorically detailed title that film diarist Ute Aurand has ever given one of her works, enumerating the location, season, and calendar date of this past excursion with an upfront alacrity —…
Late career Adam Sandler thrives within Netflix’s low stakes, and Hubie Halloween is his most buoyant effort yet. For the better part of a decade, most highbrow types generally believed that Adam Sandler — and to a lesser extent, his stable of Happy Madison directors, producers,…
Trump Card was always going to be pathetic, but it surprises in demonstrating new lows of argumentation and cohesion from its soft-minded director. Dinesh D’Souza has, somehow, once again, outdone himself. Not in terms of his technical prowess or his ability to skillfully assemble a…
John Gianvito’s Vapor Trail (Clark) — a staggering, four and a half-hour-long “cinematic prose poem” concerning Clark Air Base Command, a former United States military facility located in the Philippines, and the collective traumatic and ecological fallout left in the wake of unchecked imperialism…
Inspired by both director Ephraim Asili’s personal experiences living in a Black radical collective and the formalism of late-’60s Godard (a giant poster of La Chinoise occasionally pops up to make this more blatantly obvious), The Inheritance serves as a sociopolitical update on a…
The long-standing theoretical association made between watching cinema and being in a dream-like state is one that’s rooted in a firm misunderstanding about the autonomy of the viewing public, seeming to suggest that an audience member is a sort of malleable object — one…
Sharad Nerulkar — the titular disciple in Chaitanya Tamhane’s sophomore feature — is, by most accounts, unexceptional. He’s devoted his life to archiving, preserving, and, most importantly to him, practicing and performing classical Indian vocal music that’s considered outdated and inert by most contemporary…
The best thing one can say for Claudio Noce’s Padrenostro is that its narrative is well-intentioned. The film attempts to reckon with the lingering effects of an assassination attempt on Italy’s deputy police commissioner (inspired by Noce’s real-life father, who was almost killed in…
There never was a romance quite like it: beat poets/star-crossed lovers Exene Cervenka and John Doe form a little rock band with guitarist Billy Zoom and drummer D. J. Bonebrake — a list of names straight out of a Charles Bukowski novel — then…
An effort of self-serious arthouse aspiration, Song Without a Name brings nothing new to the table. Melina León’s Song Without A Name is representative of a lauded — and mostly corrosive — cinematic trend that’s grown in popularity over the past decade. In films of…
