A Babysitter’s Guide to Monster Hunting is an old-school, family-friendly romp of pleasing, lightweight horror. Adapted from the eponymous trilogy of YA novels by Joe Ballarini, Rachel Talalay’s A Babysitter’s Guide to Monster Hunting is a zippy entry in Netflix’s Halloween catalog. Talalay’s credits include…
Laura Gabbert has a knack for pairing gastronomy and film — as in her 2016 documentary, City of Gold, which profiles Jonathan Gold, the first food critic to win a Pulitzer Prize. Gabbert’s latest, Ottolenghi and the Cakes of Versailles, follows renowned Israeli chef…
Observed through a crystalline lens of deadpan gentility, Whit Stillman’s charming 1990 comedy of manners, Metropolitan, is a timeless tale of a bygone era. Stillman paints a world where teenagers catch trains in tuxedos and opine unironically about the merits of local versus international…
Centigrade doesn’t do much as a character-driven chamber piece, but it’s served well by an attention to detail and the ability to build genuine tension. In 2012, a man named Peter Skyllberg made headlines for surviving in his car for two months with no food…
Adam Rehmeier’s sophomore film Dinner in America updates an early-2000s brand of suburban misfit ennui with a winning, occasionally uneven blend of sweet and sour teen angst. It lacks the cringey earnestness of Napoleon Dynamite or Ghost World’s undercurrent of resigned melancholy, content to…
Relic is a nifty work of ambiguous horror built on the duality of destruction and creation. Relic, the debut feature from Japanese-Australian director Natalie Erika James, is a haunted house drama with a thrillingly cerebral core. Edna, the family matriarch (Australian theater veteran Robyn Nevin),…
Set in the small coastal town of Oiso, Takuya Misawa’s sophomore feature is a crisp, withholding tale of pent-up aggression and toxic masculine friendship. A small crew of young men in matching bomber jackets gamble, smoke, and drink together in a garage, nominally employed…
At the crossroads of about a half-dozen genres and borrowing the best that each has to offer, there’s no other movie quite like Ridley Scott’s Thelma & Louise. It’s remarkable that a Brit previously known for atmospheric slow-burns like Alien and Blade Runner helmed…
Those familiar with Tawainese auteur Tsai Ming-liang will know what to expect from his latest feature, Days, which won the Teddy Award at the 2020 Berlinale. With his trademark slow-burn style, Tsai assembles 46 shots over 2 hours, eschewing script, storyboards, and other conventional filmmaking processes for…
In 2003’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn, Tsai Ming-liang’s gentle ode to cinema, the Taiwanese director’s famously steady camera trains on a handful of moviegoers catching a late-night screening of wuxia classic Dragon Inn. Tsai’s funhouse mirror is subtle and suspenseful, and he carves out a…
