There’s a scene in Alex Garland’s Civil War, in which a man is shot in the heart and killed. The man is from Hong…
For a film with such a coy name, we necessarily prepare, consenting or not, to play a game of comparison: why did James Benning…
“Everywhere animals disappear,” wrote art critic John Berger in his seminal book Why Look at Animals? Berger proposed an argument from capitalism, where the…
Miguel Gomes first began to build attention in the United States with his film Our Beloved Month of August in 2008. Since then, the…
Film has always stood in tense relation to history: it both creates and consumes it. Often, it does both simultaneously. Steve Erickson’s book Days…
Since the release of his first short film, Heroes Never Die, 35 years ago, Alain Guiraudie has gradually built a reputation as one of…
As Shadow of a Doubt opens, Joseph Cotton’s uncle Charlie is running away from the police. He has been lying down in his cheap…
Nominated for five Academy Awards, Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance has been one of the most talked about movies of the past year. Since its…
Since his emergence on the periphery of the “New French Extremity” in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Bruno Dumont has continued to carve…
Independent American filmmaking in the 1970s features many showcases of distinctive actor-director relationships. One of them: Joan Micklin Silver and her many great actors,…
In the 1980s, a loose-knit group of Canadian filmmakers began producing and directing independent films that gained national recognition around an aesthetic of kitchen-sink…
Watching Fabrice-Ange Zaphiratos’ Blood Beat in 2025 is a wild sensory experience. It has the (ahem) beats of a slasher while boasting atmospheric sound…
Universal Language is, at its core, a community portrait. Matthew Rankin’s second feature was co-written and imagined by friends and collaborators Pirouz Namati and…
Why do we even watch this movie in the first place? This is one of those scary movies, isn’t it? For years we hear…
The year before he starred in Witness — Peter Weir’s acclaimed drama about a cop sent to protect a young Amish boy who witnesses…
William Tell is at once large and small. It is an ambitious adaptation of 19th-century theatre, and it is a bloodthirsty action movie; it is…
“The art of interpretation is virtually one of translation,”[1] wrote Susan Sontag in 1964. But there is an impulse to resist interpreting that which…
Put ecclesiastical matters aside, just for the moment, and ask the question: what is a cathedral? What distinguishes a cathedral from a parish church?…