I was not surprised that I was deeply charmed by young Joel Alfonso Vargas’ Mad Bills To Pay, which screened at this year’s New Directors/New…
Among the most serene of thought experiments is the suggestion that a monkey, given a typewriter and unlimited time, will write a perfect copy of…
Alexandra Simpson’s No Sleep Till is an impressionistic look at a small beach town in South Florida awaiting a large Hurricane to pass through. Simpson’s…
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 Kong,…
For a film with such a coy name, we necessarily prepare, consenting or not, to play a game of comparison: why did James Benning call…
“Everywhere animals disappear,” wrote art critic John Berger in his seminal book Why Look at Animals? Berger proposed an argument from capitalism, where the industrialized…
Miguel Gomes first began to build attention in the United States with his film Our Beloved Month of August in 2008. Since then, the Portuguese…
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 Between…
Since the release of his first short film, Heroes Never Die, 35 years ago, Alain Guiraudie has gradually built a reputation as one of world…
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 hotel…
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 premiere…
Since his emergence on the periphery of the “New French Extremity” in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Bruno Dumont has continued to carve out…
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, including…
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 realism…
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 design,…
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 Ila…
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 about…
The year before he starred in Witness — Peter Weir’s acclaimed drama about a cop sent to protect a young Amish boy who witnesses a…
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 a…
“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 is…